In the sixth century before Christ there takes place across a wide swath of the civilized world a coup de theatre, a dramatic turn in the human psyche; in the East enter Confucius and the Buddha, in the West the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers. The human mind turns within and without with a nuance not encountered before. It is as if there is a slight shift in the intellectual tectonic plates of the species, and it produces the spiritual acclivity of much of the next millennium.
Among the Greeks, for our interest is occidental, great minds were mining the universe for an understanding of how it functions, how it is constructed, how it came to be, how it persists, how we experience it, how we experience self and other within it, how we know, how we value, how we function as reflective, rational beings.
The first philosophers studied the heavenly bodies and their movements. They speculated on the rudimentary construction of things giving us the primal forms of hypotheses and theories still with us—the existence of a first principle, a type of unified field theory (Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander), the evolution of species (Anaximander), the atom as fundamental item (Leucippus, Democritus), a harmonics underlying all things, a prototypical theory of strings and vibrations (Pythagoras). All these investigations were of a cosmological nature, they were considerations of the stuff of the cosmos, the processes of the cosmos, and the basis of those processes. These endeavours crested in the attempt to penetrate to a more rarefied aspect of this cosmic-stuff: its very nature or status as Be-ing (Heraclitus, Parmenides).
We all function with some assumption regarding be-ing, of what it means to say something is or is not, some notion of the correct or fallacious application of the verb to be. Reaching the groundwork of that most inclusive term at the root of understanding is philosophy’s ultimate analytical goal. Heraclitus claimed we cannot arrive at a constancy called Be-ing at the base of all that is because the very nature of all be-ing, of all that is, is be-coming, a constant flux, an endless flow of change, an incessant abiogenic thrust. His vision of reality is usually given: all things are in flux, or changing is everything. Parmenides takes his stand at the opposite end of the spectrum and declares that change is a perceptual illusion, being is a constant. He makes this declaration because he treats be-ing not as some fundament of a primitive awareness, but as a determined item, as akin to a mental concept such as “circle”. Unlike “circle” which has a rather limited field of application, “being” has a virtually universal application. What is is, and the truth of this can be grasped only by the mind. Endurance and thing, mental construct and reality are fused. “Being” is, it cannot be “not is”, non-being, be-coming, or a ceasing-to-be. There is either be-ing or nothingness.
The divide in the theoretical world about the basic-most nature of the objective world coupled with flux in the socio-political world created a dynamic that moved a number of investigators to shift their focus from the object, the world and world-stuff, to the subject, to man. These investigators, known to us as the Sophists, disregarded the sphere of rationalizations that was emanating more puzzles and paradoxes than insights, and set their emphasis on the more immediate aspect of experience. Their questions were not about the nature of reality at its basis, but the meaning of reality as it appears to man. Here the ideas of truth and moral rectitude no longer hang upon the nature of eternal or cosmic laws, but upon man, his passions, his instincts, his nature, his situation. This, of course, has the potential to open the door to subjectivism, relativism, scepticism, cynicism, materialism, and it did.
Socrates, Plato’s mentor, decries the banality of this approach and demands a return to reason, to the discovery of those aspects of man’s knowing that bear the marks of universality and necessity, to clearly discerned ideas or concepts, and to the means of their discernment, introspection. There is here a slight change of direction from earlier efforts, from reason searching the cosmos to reason searching man. Knowledge and the propriety of being man are joined. To know properly is to be properly. If one is not good, it is because one does not know, does not clearly understand good. To know one-self truly is to be a self truly. Knowledge, being, and virtue become synonymous. This intelligent integrating introspection establishes, at least implicitly, a form-al distinction betwixt man and world. Herein also, the Greek preoccupation with the ideal form and aesthetics (proportionality, beauty, truth, good, etc.) is intellectually manifested as precisely as it is in the unrivalled beauty of Greek sculptures that provide us the ideal human form.
All these investigations form a cyclorama enlacing Plato’s thought. When, however, Plato looked within he found a crystalline form, a clarity in his ideas that spoke of no essential, no necessary, connection to the bedraggled stuff of the bustling world about him. Plato could not bring himself to acknowledge that something abstract and universal (our ideas), and therefore, to his mind, the perfect and eternal, could evolve from something material, particular and imperfect (sensations from world-stuff). He believed ideas were not derivable from sensation, but were themselves the foundation of all things particular. Ideas were the real, existing beyond the constraints, the imperfections, the flux of the material world, and epitomized in the idea of the good, which in itself contained all other ideas including the ideas of the true and the beautiful. He could not fabricate a theory as to how these perfect entities influenced the imperfect world beyond the conjecture that some force, a Demiurge, for some reason, looked upon the eternal ideas, the perfect forms, and used them as models on which to fashion the world out of the great scope of non-being.
To them that find Plato’s claim that the eternal and rational soul of man holds within it the eternal and rational idea of a circle enabling man to see circles in the sensible world sounds a tad fanciful, I offer three points for consideration. First, Plato’s analysis is not in contradiction to a consistent strain in both oriental and occidental philosophy which values the material world as an illusion, or as a fabrication, as a construct of mind. Second, Plato’s terminology may be mollified if one accounts that for Plato the term “idea” refers to a rational form, a type of rational measure or canon. Third, it may do one well to reflect upon the fact that a good deal of modern physics rests upon a somewhat similar idealistic assumption, namely, that the observer in and by the very act of observing colours, textures, and contours that which is observed. This may not be exactly Plato’s position, but it does intuitively touch upon the same underpinning expressed in the hidden variable theory, Eddington’s theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and even the Schrodinger thought experiment. Our quotidian world seems quite concrete. We are a part of it. The mind, however, has a way of sensing itself apart from that, experiencing itself as an immaterial constancy opposed to the flux of concrete stuff.
According to Plato, the human soul, or more precisely, the rational soul (as opposed to the two other souls [animating forms] he discerned in man: the sensible and concupiscible) exists eternally with the ideas or ideal forms. As such it is immortal. In its earthly entrapment it is capable of reawakening to the memory of its fellowship with the eternal ideas or forms, therein opening itself to truth, beauty and the good, or in brief, to wisdom. In contemplation the rational soul can pierce the veil of illusion and return to the true understanding of self as eternal and one with the Ideas.
We have in this consideration of reality an idealistic view of self and world, one disposed to discounting the mundane, the world of sensation and feeling, one oriented toward contemplation, rational control, dispassionate self-mastery. Plato’s analysis does not give answer to why the Demiurge makes things, why it models things on the basis of the Ideas, or why the rational aspect of man, the rational soul, is also an eternal idea, why it and ideas, as opposed to their images, are encased in the world of matter. The theoretical dualism twixt eternal ideas and non-being is not resolved, merely, at best, escapable by contemplation. The Good, Plato’s “divine” principle, is an eternal abstract, above and beyond self-consciousness, the need or the ability to interact. The Demiurge is a mere cosmic organizing medium, not unlike the muchly celebrated Higgs boson.
In Plato’s defence, he was not creating a systematic theory concerning the nature of being and knowledge so much as trying to elucidate the path to enlightenment, to a true beholding and valuation of self, and this not through cold logical syllogisms but orderly argument carried out in a series of dialogues or conversations, husking off nuance by nuance until the crystalline idea, the perfect form, emerged to view. Yet, despite whatever insights into the functions of mind Plato provides, he leaves us the abiding heritage wherein the divine is a pure and self-contained abstraction, and the soul a self that awaits its purification by abstraction. The Greek dedication to ideal and form gives us the geometrically ideal and perfectly formed Acropolis, and in Plato delivers us that same world rarefied to intellectual perfection. The divine is raised beyond all touch, all movement, a frozen serenity, and the soul, its human avatar, trapped in the imperfection and commonality of this life, can only strive to close its eyes to banalities that besiege it and labour back to its enduring selfhood: the good, true, and beauteous.
This Platonic vision, while denigrating of Olympus, does not displace it. Something more potent is at play, for while popular accretion around the cults of the Olympians holds, there is manifest in the clerisy a subtle acceleration toward intellectual abstraction, toward breaking open archetypes, toward challenging the anthropomorphic envisionings of the divine, the luminous, the numinous powers. Thus, Xenophanes could set out his thesis that had cattle gods, bovine in nature they would appear, that X will always encapsulate its vision of the ultimate as the ultimate form of X. Plato’s extreme elevation of the divine above mundane Olympus, wherein the visions of power, beauty, light, etc. are encoded as Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, et al., is part and parcel of the thrust we noted at the beginning of this paper–a transcendence–replicated within their respective cultural milieus by the Hebrew prophets, the priests of Egypt, the Buddha, etc. The vision of the prime principle, of the “divine” (in theology: God, in philosophy: the Absolute, in religion: the Holy, in psychology: the Whole) evolves. But Plato takes this nuanced leap of comprehension and incises it into a nascent theory of how we know, into an epistemology, and so by Plato’s hand philosophy co-opts the foundations of religion, making them answerable to rational analysis and critique. Xenophanes may have said man makes his gods. Plato opens a more fateful door, for while the all-transcending is still a numinous presence before which man may well need to examine his soul, man, reasoning man, logically reflecting man, can now call the depiction of the all-transcending to task upon the couch of man the analyst. In Plato’s work religion sets out on the path of being superseded by, being challenged by theology as a branch of philosophy, and nuance upon nuance in this unfolding analysis creates the maze of theorizing we still walk, the maze in the articles to come we will attempt to map.