|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||
|
Mini-Course in Philosophy The Development of Philosophy - Part I |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A Mini-Course in The Philosophy of Socrates and Plato (Continued)
Section 3: Theories of Plato The name Plato is familiar to everyone, even to Macaulay's schoolboy. But many are unaware that the word Plato is a nickname. The real name of this philosopher was Aristocles. It is said that he was of stocky build, and that his broad shoulders earned him the nickname Plato, for platos is Greek for breadth. Perhaps the famous name Plato was the invention of some companion who fixed it upon the young Aristocles as a schoolboy of our day labels a comrade by reason of physical appearance and knows him thenceforth as "Shorty" or "Stumpy" or "Slim." Plato (picture) lived from 427 to 347 B.C., and was of noble descent. He was a splendidly gifted man, and he used his gifts with studious diligence. He was a poet, a playwright, an observant traveler, a philosopher, and, -- most important of all, -- a literary stylist of the first rank. Plato destroyed his plays and poems, but he retained his splendid style, and this fact (together with the other fact that many of his works survive intact to our day) has a great deal to do with his enduring fame. Many of his theories are exalted and attractive, but it may be questioned whether his essential philosophy would have lived if it had been clothed in less artistic expression. Does anyone doubt that a masterly style can be so effective as to "put a man over?" Let such a person consider Renan. Let him consider Pascal. Let him even consider Will Durant. Then let him consider Plato. Plato studied under the philosopher Cratylus and then for eight years he was the pupil of Socrates. His own period of teaching was a long and notable intellectual reign. He died in Athens at the ripe age of eighty. We have thirty-five dialogues attributed to Plato. Many of these are unquestionably genuine; some are spurious; some are of doubtful authenticity. Among the important ones commonly accepted as genuine are: Gorgias, The Banquet, Phaedo, Phaedrus, The Republic, Timaeus, Laws, Theaetetus, and most of his Letters. Like Socrates, Plato was interested, first and foremost, in the critical question, but this question was, for him, intertwined with the psychological question rather than with the ethical question as in the Socratic system. The basic and unifying doctrine of Plato's philosophy is his theory of knowledge. This is a famous theory, and it served Plato well in his efforts to bring into a harmonious system the notable teachings of his predecessors and contemporaries. But, for all that, it is a false and futile theory. Plato taught that each man was originally a soul. He was a spirit living in a world of things-in-themselves; a world of substantial universal ideals or forms. The world about us is a world of individual things. We see individual trees, we speak to individual men, we hear individual sounds, we notice individual instances or expressions of beauty. And yet our intellectual knowledge is not individual; it is universal. The eye can see only individual trees, but the mind or intellect knows what tree means. We have knowledge of tree-in-itself or tree-as-such. We can write the definition of tree, and it defines each and every tree that has ever existed, or exists now, or will exist, or can exist. For we know and define an essence; We are not confined to the sense-knowledge of individual things that have that essence. How can it be that, in a world make up exclusively of individual things, we have this universal knowledge of essences in the abstract? Aristotle was presently to give the right answer to this important question. He was to teach that the mind has the power of peering beneath the trappings of individuality and getting at the essences of things. This abstractive power of the human intellect was something that Plato neither recognized nor suspected. Plato thought that the only explanation of the universal ideas in our minds is found in the fact that those minds once confronted universal things. So he taught that we have had a previous existence in a spiritual realm (preexistence of souls). There we confronted and beheld not trees, but tree-in-itself; there we saw, not a beautiful object or scene, but beauty-subsisting-in-itself; there we knew, not something good, but substantial goodness itself. Now man, the soul, somehow sinned. The spirit that dwelt in the world of things-as-they-are, or things-substantially-subsisting-in-themselves, was somehow contaminated, and this by its own fault. For this offense, the soul was imprisoned in a body and put here on the earth. As the soul was thrust into its body-prison, it forgot all its splendid knowledge. But the body is equipped with channels of knowledge; we call them the senses. These can deal only with the externals of individual things, but still they do give us knowledge. And this individual knowledge garnered by the senses stirs the soul, prods it to recall what once it knew. And so, stirred by the objects of sense, a man dimly and imperfectly remembers what things are. To know is to remember. Here we see that Plato taught these things:
And in all five teachings Plato was calamitously wrong. The previous existence of souls (or preexistence, as it is technically called) is philosophically untenable. Innatism or the doctrine of inborn knowledge is a theory wholly indefensible, as philosophers of all ages have shown, from Aristotle to Locke. We acquire our knowledge. Starting with the experiences of the senses which bring us knowledge of things in their concrete and material individuality, we rise, by the abstractive power of the mind, to the recognition of what kind of things we sense; we recognize essences; we form universal ideas or concepts. And these are the elements of our intellectual knowledge. As we have seen in discussing the theories of Socrates, the union of soul and body in man is a substantial union, not an accidental one. The soul is not merely in the body. Soul and body are so united as to form one single, if compound, substance. Man is not a body alone, nor a soul alone; neither is he merely a soul-in-a-body. Plato said that the soul is in the body controlling it as a rower is in a boat moving it at will by his efforts at the oars. This is wholly false. Man is an animated body, a soul-infused body, a soul-and-body-compound. Union of soul and body is not accidental but substantial. The soul is indeed the most important part or element of a man; it is what theistic classical realists call the substantial form of the living body; yet it is not the whole man. And while the soul, which is a spirit, can exist alone, and does exist alone when it leaves the body at death, it has a kind of connatural need for the body because it cannot exercise all the functions of which it is the natural principle or source unless it be joined in substance with its body. Plato's notion of a supernal realm where things exist as universal substances is a fanciful conception, highly poetic, pleasingly imaginative, but it is a wholly gratuitous assumption and is in no sense a philosophical truth. Indeed, reason cannot admit the possibility of any finite thing existing in universal. Plato's vague theory seems to imply the notion that all the subsisting universal forms or ideals are unified and identified in the Subsistent Ideal of The Good. Of the abstractive power of the human intellect which Plato implicitly denies without having heard of it or thought of it, we have already spoken briefly. Plato's theory of knowledge supports, however vainly and shallowly, the important doctrines of the changelessness of truth, the possibility of man's achieving certitude, and the possibility of science. Like Socrates, Plato, despite his purpose of harmonizing and unifying all notable theories of philosophers, turned his face steadily against the destructive and self-contradictory skepticism of the Sophists. In discussing the cosmological question, Plato teaches that the bodily universe and all the bodily things in it are ultimately made of some primordial world-stuff which has the elemental forms of air, earth, fire, and water. Thus Plato borrows from the Ionians, particularly from Empedocles. We must ever remember that he was a harmonizer; he had the avowed purpose of bringing all acceptable philosophies into unity and system. The primordial world-stuff (which first appears as air, earth, fire, water) is sometimes called the Platonian prime matter. This term is apt to be misleading, for Plato's world-stuff was a definite kind of matter, and hence was not primary but secondary. We shall discuss the true meaning of "prime matter" in our study of Aristotle's cosmology. Plato believed, with Socrates, that the world is the best of all possible worlds (cosmological optimism) since God could make nothing inferior. And, since life is superior to nonlife, the world must be alive (hylozoism). God, -- the Subsistent Idea or Ideal of the Good, -- created the world. As Creator, God is called Demiurge. Before the bodily universe was made, God created certain spirits; to these He committed the work of creating the bodily world. Yet He reserved to Himself the creation of man's soul. Plato's cosmology is full of errors. Neither his primal matter (which turns out to be secondary or not primal) nor his elements are ultimate explanations of bodies. Both are bodies themselves, and hence offer the same problem to the philosopher as the universe taken at face value. As for his cosmological optimism, the world is not the absolutely best world, else the inexhaustible power of the Creator would be exhausted in its making; it is relatively the best inasmuch as it is most admirably suited for its purpose. Nor is anything to be called inferior or imperfect which fits into its place and service for the achieving of purpose. Hence Plato's argument for optimism and for hylozoism are gratuitous and valueless. As we have seen, much psychological doctrine is bound up with Plato's fundamental philosophy, his famous Theory of Knowledge. Coming directly to the psychological question, Plato teaches that man's soul (directly created by God) is spiritual, rational, self-moving, immortal. The body-prison in which the soul is enclosed was originally a male body. From this was drawn a female body and also the bodies of animals. Once produced, living bodies proceeded to multiply by the process of generation. In addition to the spiritual soul, man has a sensing-soul and a soul which is the source of courage. Only the spiritual soul is immortal. If a man properly purifies himself in this life and casts off the guilt of the offense that led to the imprisonment of his soul in the body, the soul will return at his death to the realm of substantial ideals or forms from which its primal fault banished it. If, however, a man have lived ill, his soul will pass at his death into a female body (transmigration of souls or metempsychosis). If the female existence be badly spent, the soul will next appear in an animal, and eventually, if evil endures, in a plant. Hopelessly incorrigible souls will be put in a place of torment. At times Plato speaks of this hell as eternal; again he seems to suggest that all souls will eventually be purified and sent to the heaven of substantial ideals. The idea of a primal fall of man is common to all the ancients and can be explained only as a surviving remnant of the Primitive Revelation. All the world remembers Original Sin, and that, as Mr. Chesterton points our, is one reason why so many modern intellectuals are anxious to deny it. Plato's theory of three souls in man is fantastic; perhaps we might interpret this doctrine to mean that man's soul has three notable modes of action. The doctrine of a spiritual, immortal, rational soul in man is true, and is demonstrated in the department of philosophy called Rational Psychology. The notion of transmigration of souls is oriental rather than Grecian, yet it had won the approval of those Greeks who followed Pythagorean doctrine, and so Plato puts it into his harmonized system. It is utterly false, however, and lacks every vestige of scientific or philosophical proof. The notion that existing females are only reincarnations of unworthy males should scarcely endear Plato to the devout female sex. The Platonian doctrine of heaven and hell falls short of reality but suggests it. Plato shrinks from the bald assertion of the eternity of hell as many persons do today under the mistaken impression that they are being fair and merciful. In discussing the ethical question, Plato holds that sin is inevitable because of the dullness of the mind which guides the will. But, says Plato, the inevitable sin is to be laid to man's charge; he is responsible for it in cause, inasmuch as he freely committed the primal sin which brought imprisonment in the body and consequent fullness of mind. The ultimate goal of human effort is happiness. Man does not find happiness in things that serve his earthly use (utilitarianism), nor in things which flatter the senses (hedonism), but in the steady effort to live virtuously and to know The Good, that is, God. Earthly man is meant for life with his fellows, and human society takes on a necessary form in the State. The civil power (that is, the State) must take control of each child early in life; it must discover the child's special aptitudes and train him in accordance with them, so that the State may be a harmonious and smoothly functioning organism. The best form of government is that in which a few wise men hold the place of control (aristocracy or sophocracy). The next best form of government is military rule (timocracy). Less desirable and even bad forms of government are : oligarchy or the rule of certain families; democracy or the rule of the rank and file of common people; and tyranny or the rule of an absolute sovereign who lacks wisdom, foresight, and kindness. Plato rightly declares that the goal of human conduct is happiness, and teaches that happiness is to be sought in the knowledge of God and the practice of virtue. Plato is entirely wrong in his theory that the citizen exists for the State. Strictly speaking, the State exists for the citizen. And while the State must control the citizen in many things and exact obedience to its laws, it does so in the interest of the body of citizens, not in its own interest as though it were a thing independent of the citizens and superior to them. For, while the State is a natural society and not an artificial one founded on some compact or agreement of men (as Hobbes, Rousseau, and others were to teach later in their theories of Social Compact or Social Contract), it is not the owner of its citizens but their servant; it is not their superior but their inferior. Of course, it is not for the individual man to say that, since the State is his servant, he may order it about as he chooses; the State is not his personal servant, but the servant of all citizens together. And, while the individual man is the important thing, he must remember that there are many other individuals with rights equal to his own and of the same sort as his own. Hence the individual must be prepared to make willing personal sacrifice, to endure inconvenience, to curb antisocial impulses; he must obey civil laws, and must expect and accept punishment for the violation of these laws, -- which really means the violation of other men's rights. Sane ethics thus avoids two evil extremes which actually meet in their enslavement of the individual; it avoids exaggerated individualism (with its inevitable enslavement of the many in the interest of the few who happen to have power), and avoids totalitarianism or State absolutism (with its inevitable enslavement of the citizens in the interest of civil power, or, more precisely, in the interest of evil politicians who manipulate the civil power). The root of Plato's calamitously mistaken doctrine of State absolutism is found in his view of the State as an organism of which the citizen is but a cell, that is, a thing dependent, inferior, existing only for the well-being of the larger organism of which it is but a tiny part. This view (which was later to be developed by Herbert Spencer, who taught that all humanity is one organism) is full of damage to the human race. One type of such damage appears in the cry for State control of education, -- a thing which Plato himself openly favored. It must be kept steadily and clearly in mind that parents have the right and the duty of educating their children. And the aim of true education is the producing of good men and women, not the producing of good citizens. Of course, good men and women will be good citizens, but that is incidental to their character as good men and women. The function of the State in education is to guard the rights of parents in the matter, to supply opportunity for the realization of this right, and to help in various ways in its actual exercise. But State control of education is an unqualified evil; it works always to the ruin of sound government and peaceful social life; inevitably so, since it is a contradiction of the natural law. Summary of Part I of The Development of Philosophy In Part I, we have noticed that the first and fundamental question of all philosophy is the critical question, that is, the question of the extent and reliability of human knowledge. We have seen that the truth that man can know, can reason, can have certitude, is a self-evident truth which neither requires nor admits direct proof. We have studied, in brief outline, the doctrines taught by Socrates and by Plato, finding in them both truth and falsity, sometimes strangely commingled, but discerning in them a new and penetrating philosophical effort, a more thorough and complete speculation, than the pagan world had yet known. In a word, we find in these two sets of theories a developing philosophy; we find that here the true and perennial philosophy beings to take form. Our vocabulary of philosophical terms and phrases has been enriched as we learned the meaning of:
Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book...
|
|
|
Philosophy Resource Center Main Page |
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
[Homepage] [Newsletter] [Search] [Support the Academy] [Link to Us] [Contact the Academy] [Citing Articles from Our Website] [Privacy Policy & Disclaimer]
Copyright 1998-99, 2000-01, 2002-03, & 2004-05 by The Radical Academy. All Rights Reserved.