Posted on 09/24/2003 11:25:56 PM PDT by betty boop
This shift of attention to the individual psyche marks a decisive, revolutionary break with the characteristic habits of thought of the ancient world, the cosmological consciousness, which conceived of man mainly in terms of his connections to units larger than the individual, and envisioned a cosmos filled with gods. For Plato’s life-long meditation on the psyche – the human soul -- was deeply implicated in his speculation on the nature of the divine, which radically departed from the Hellenic people’s myth of the gods. Psyche also was the basis of Plato’s life-long meditation on “the best possible” political order.
Platonic thought can probably best be understood as a kind of spiritual autobiography. Great philosopher that he was (perhaps the greatest), Plato was not a “system builder”; he did not propound any positivist doctrine on any subject at all.
This aspect of Platonic thought is difficult for the modern imagination to grasp; for when we moderns think of a “philosopher,” we think of an intellectual who investigates propositions about truth and draws conclusive answers about the objects of his investigation. The philosopher then assembles his insights into systematic form allegedly useful in telling us about the real nature of things. (Plato called this sort of thing “philodoxy,” – love of transitory opinion -- the specialty of the Sophists, his adversaries. He would not call it “philosophy” – love of wisdom. This issue, however, is beyond the scope of the present essay.)
Although Plato is usually classed as an Idealist, his own instinct in philosophizing was uncompromisingly Realist, in the sense that he knew that certain questions can never be “closed” in principle. For the truth of existence, of Reality, is the object of zetesis -- of a search or quest -- that cannot be completed by any human being in the time of his own existence. Rather, it is a quest engaging all mankind proceeding through countless generations. Plato could point out the way. But the student must engage in the quest by and for himself, and understand it as he experiences it, according to his love for divine things.
On that note, we turn now to the consideration of psyche proper. Plato conceived of the individual human being as psyche-in-soma: an eternal soul incarnated in finite bodily existence.
The soul has a characteristic structure, a hierarchy of dynamic forces: the rational element, whose ordering power is sophia, wisdom; the spirited, whose ordering power is andreia, or manly virtue/courage; and the appetitive, whose ordering power is to “feel the pull” of physis, or bodily nature. The well-ordered soul is the healthy integration of the three forces, giving each its proper role and function.
In addition to elaborating a hierarchy of forces in the soul, the Platonic meditation also elaborates its hierarchical “structure”: At psyche’s “summit” is nous, intellect; followed by the conscious mind – including feeling, sensation; and “at bottom,” the unconscious mind, with its root in the “depth” of the soul, in which the soul’s “ground of being” can be found.
I’ve used a lot of quotation marks in the above passage for a reason. To use language like this is to intend as reified objects what are really processes on-going in the soul. We aren’t speaking of “thing-like objects” here. Processes aren’t things at all. But they are real all the same.
With that caution in mind, we have, so far, a “force field” and a “structure” for the soul, and importantly, the suggestion that the soul ought to be well-ordered.
And so the question arises: By what criteria does the soul order itself? And why would it even want to order itself?
To answer such we questions, we have to remember that the Platonic speculation maintains the immortality of the soul. The soul coming into bodily existence, however, does not remember its pre-existence at all; for at its birth into the present existence, the “circuits of the brain” become “deranged,” so the soul cannot remember anything about its life prior to its birth in this one. So it comes as a shock to the soul to discover that its body will die someday. The anxiety is acute, for the soul does not yet realize that its life is not dependent on the body, and is not destroyed with the body.
It is here (The Republic) that Plato inserts a drama in which the soul must act, the Pamphylian myth.
In the myth, “dead souls” – that is, souls separated from the body at physical death – receive reward or punishment according to their conduct in life, the bad souls going to their suffering beneath the earth, the good souls to their blessed existence in heaven. Then, after a thousand years, all the dead souls are brought into the Judgment of Lachesis, the daughter of Ananke (Necessity). And there the dead souls must draw their several lots and choose their individual fate for their next period of incarnated existence:
| Ananke’s daughter, the maiden Lachesis, her word: Souls of a day! Beginning of a new cycle, for the mortal race, to end in death! The daemon will not be allotted to you; but you shall select the daemon. The first by the lot, shall the first select the life to which he will be bound by necessity. Arete has no master; and as a man honors or dishonors her, he will have her increased or diminished. The guilt is the chooser’s; God is guiltless. |
Now a soul that had just spent one thousand years in purgative punishment in the netherworld would be most anxious to choose his daemon rightly, lest at the conclusion of the next life, he find himself returned to the suffering below for another thousand years. On the other hand, the blessed souls do not necessarily make better choices than the purged souls. And they are just as liable to wind up in punishment in the next round if they do not choose wisely.
But choose they must, and thereby bind themselves to their fate over the next cycle of life and death. A soul’s only guide in the choice is the character it had acquired during its preceding life. The choice is free, but the wisdom to make a good choice may be deficient. Under the circumstances, the best course would be to make the best choice one can, and then follow Arete – Virtue. To “diminish her” – to dishonor her call to justice, temperance, courage, love of wisdom, zealous search for true being – is to incur culpable guilt. The daemon is there to warn the soul when it wanders from Arete, endeavoring to push the soul up into the light.
The daemon might be thought of as the mediator or agent of cosmic spiritual substance in the soul, a little spark of the divine in man. Plato’s symbol for the divine substance is the Agathon, the Good.
The Agathon is utterly transcendent, so immanent propositions about it cannot be constructed in principle. Yet the soul, in an act of transcendence, may have a vision of the Agathon, of its eternally divine goodness, purity, beauty, truth, and justice. Such experiences of transcendence inform the soul, building up its just order by fortifying the Arete in the soul.
Thus the soul is drawn upward into the light of the vision of the Agathon, and participates in the divine life so far as that is possible for a man.
It is important to bear in mind that the Agathon is not God. Though Plato often refers to the One God “Beyond” the world of created things, and “Beyond” the generations of the intracosmic gods (the gods of the Age or Chronos, subsequently replaced by the Olympians under the rulership of Zeus), and strongly suggests that the Logos of divine Nous is the ordering principle of the Cosmos, he does not elaborate. That elaboration had to wait for the Revelation of Christ.
For Plato, the vision of the Agathon was the basis of the idea of the human family, of a common shared humanity, of the idea of the brotherhood of mankind. As Eric Voegelin noted (Order and History, Vol. III, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1957), “The understanding of a universal humanity originates in the experience of transcendence; and the ineffable kinship of men under God revealed in the experience can immanently be expressed only in a myth of descent from a common mother or father….”
In this, Plato seems to anticipate St. Paul’s one body of Christ, interjecting the idea that, despite their differences, all men are equal as brothers in the sight of God.
For Plato, the daimon-mediated tensional suspense of the soul “in between” (metaxy) its cosmic ground in the “depth” of the soul and its extracosmic height in a transcendental “beyond” in the one God, was the site and sensorium of human spiritual reality. The form of the metaxy might be seen as a faint foreshadowing of the mediating process of Christ in the salvation and perfection of the soul, uniting souls to the Father through Himself, as declared by Christian revelation, most clearly in John’s Gospel.
It is possible to imagine that there are certain seed ideas in Plato that could not come into full bloom until Jesus Christ irrupted into human history four centuries after Plato’s death.
And man is unique among creatures, for he alone possess nous; and thus is capable of being drawn to the paradigm of divine Nous -- to the contemplation of divine things. Thus man is uniquely capable of ordering his soul according to the divine paradigm, in justice and in love. And by a process of transcendence, to attain wisdom, freedom, and true Being in the contemplation of the divine Idea, the Agathon.
Excellent! But aren't you arming the enemy a little giving them to me?
(Just kidding.)
Hank
Good point, Hank. Yet I suppose eventually more will be "seen" as more of the universe is "lit up" when the light from what is the present Hubble horizon eventually gets here. Maybe not by you or me, but by some future generation. So the question isn't really answerable as a flat-out negative, as far as we know.
It has nothing to do with feeling.
Questions like this don't have much to do with "feeling."
I’m glad you mentioned the fig tree. Speaking of what one can or cannot know, it is an example of something which requires spiritual perception.
The fig tree is a metaphor for Israel which is “a type” for the Christian walk. In the firstripe Israel was full of promise, but then she went astray:
For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive [them], and ye shall have [them]. And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses. Mark 11:20-26
Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel. Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these. And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. - John 1:47-51
Mark wrote:
... And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon. He did not say it was a charade to provide a spiritual lesson. I believe Mark.
Your view agrees with most of the commentaries. I think the commentaries are mistaken.
Men come to the Bible assuming they know what it teaches, and when they find something that doesn't quite agree with what they expect, they "interpret" it to mean what they want. I only take the plain meaning where it is clear.
The only lesson Jesus himself made from this incident is the lesson on prayer. That's sufficient for me.
People have a very strange Idea that Jesus was not really a human being like other human beings. The Bible says he "became" flesh and blood, that is, a human being. He was not God in a man, He was God become a man, completely a man. Do you suppose Jesus did not have to look where he was walking, find his sandals, and look when he was pouring wine? If he was really a man He would have to, and if He was really a man, he would not know what was on a fig tree until He looked.
Hank
To drive my point home wrt spiritual discernment, I aver that I consulted not a single commentary in coming up with post 124. The meaning was known to me.
Well, that's what's so nice about belonging to the human race. What we cannot do in our generation might well be done in a future generation. The point is the evolution of human consciousness and knowledge does not stop when either you or I do.
I guess to have a "comfort level" WRT such an observation requires, as Eric Voeglin said (quoted above), an experience of transcendence.
For me, the take-away from an experience such as that is the knowledge, seen in the spirit and by the spirit, that there really is -- ontologically speaking -- a human community, there really is a brotherhood of mankind.
To judge by what I see all around me today, human societies become increasingly unlivable in the degree they depart from what the transcendent vision reports as the truthful norm of human being and existence.
Some have put the point more crudely, bluntly: Man is by his nature a "social animal." The point ought to be clear.
Here's where Platonists and Autonomists part ways, even if they agree the point that sends them out onto different roads is true.
The reason I am not drawn to Objectivist or Autonomist perspectives is that neither spends much time or effort elaborating the problem of human society. One even gets the feeling that the main reason O+As want to elaborate a system of laws is to protect them from society.
While I can well understand why and how that is a reasonable concern these days, it does not follow that any body of thought that pretends to be philosophy or science can profit much from an extreme preoccupation with the discrete, individual self. Balance is needed.
Which is not to say that individual people aren't important and loved by other people. And moreover, each person is individually, uniquely, and eternally beloved and sacred to God. To say that balance is needed at the human/social scale is merely to recognize that "parts" have relations to "wholes," whether they want to have them or not.
There have been times -- say, reading Ayn Rand, and contemplating the wonderment of a Dagney Taggert or even Hank Reardon -- when I realized the relentless egocentric self-preoccupation of such characters seemed to border on the monomaniacal. I hardly regard them as "role models" myself.
It was like Romanticism on steroids, of the "Invictus" type. You know the poem I mean: "I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul." (Or did I get that backwards?) Here we have the romantic picture of the Byronic individualist, manifesting an indominable will to always ACT, to always PREVAIL against ALL ODDS!
Well this would be all well and good, except for the untidy fact that human existence and experience universally includes more than just the ACTION PRINCIPLE!!!
It also includes suffering. The Greeks had a name for this: pathos: Our human feeling for the suffering of other human beings.
Pathos isn't about what a man does; pathos refers to what is "done to" a man. It is passion, in the sense of the experience of "suffering" from causes that one did not create. Examples: the loss of a loved one; the desperation of disease, or unrequited love. Victimizations of the self of multifarious description by unscrupulous, disordered others. And then the "final insult," physical death. You get the picture.
The point is: In a certain sense, pathos is the common feature of universal human existential experience, just as much as the "action principle," which gives impetus to the achievements of human reason and creativity....
Man's fate is that he, as an individual soul, participates in reality through action and passion. This is human nature.
This is also the human condition.
We may say that we have no way of knowing what another person knows or feels in his own consciousness. But do we not know the contents of our own? And make some "reasonable" guesses -- given our common humanity, our common existence -- that would make our (yet unacknowledged) neighbor into our brother?
Does that seem too "idealistic" for you, Hank?
Surely you realize by now that precisely this is the language of God's Call to His faithful.
In every age, I might add.
Good point, Hank. [Thank you!] Yet [I knew it couldn't last] I suppose eventually more will be "seen" as more of the universe is "lit up" when the light from what is the present Hubble horizon eventually gets here. Maybe not by you or me, but by some future generation. So the question isn't really answerable as a flat-out negative, as far as we know.
Yes, of course, but then, we cannot know there will be anyone here to see it when it does arrive, even though we suppose there will.
(You might check something for me. Isn't the Hubble horizon the theoretical point at which all matter is moving away from us at velocities that preclude the light from ever reaching us? I really cannot remember, but believe there is such a theoretical "border," if not the Hubble horizon.)
Hank
The MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations, which measure minute variations in the CMB, recently reported new results at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. All three agree remarkably about what the “harmonic proportions” of the cosmos imply: not only is the universe flat, but its structure is definitely due to inflation, not to topological defects in the early universe.
The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution “power spectra” show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks.
The peaks indicate harmonics in the sound waves that filled the early, dense universe. Until some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot that matter and radiation were entangled in a kind of soup in which sound waves (pressure waves) could vibrate. The CMB is a relic of the moment when the universe had cooled enough so that photons could "decouple" from electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way.
Well, if we keep up this kind of intellectual equivocating in the face of urgent existential problems, Hank, then perhaps the human race will die with us (i.e., with our generation). And then the question would be moot.
On your second question, if you haven't read the Tegmark article on quantum multiverses, please do yourself the favor, for it clears up some of the relevant issues WRT theories of universal "horizons." As I recall it was the Level II multiverse model that provided scope for the expansion of the universe to forever outrun human observation. That's a possibility. But there are other even more interesting possibilities (IMHO) as well.
I read that one of the names for our entire expanding (it appears) universe -- encompassing nebulae, galaxies, solar systems, planets, moons, ecosystems, etc. -- is "the Hubble volume." A volume must have a "border" or container of some kind; or it couldn't be a volume.
Earlier on this thread, bigcat00 made an observation about Eros in connection with Plato's thought, and characterized it -- most accurately in my view -- as the passionate love of Truth, which to a Christian like me is another Name of God.
Plato's Eros was taken "to the next level" in Christian faith, where it was christened in the name Agape.
Humans tend to have a nose for truth. That is, if they're paying any attention at all. Which the distractions, din, and sheer cacaphony of life in the present culture often makes difficult.
Still, maybe we just need to "follow the scent" more....
Amen to that, Alamo-Girl!
I often have the acute sense that the signs of God are quite obvious -- in the sense of being "out there 'in plain view'." All you have to do is take a clear-eyed, good-faith look at the human and natural world all around you, and you will see His "signature" everywhere. Or so it seems to me.
Of course, if one is "determined" (i.e., self-determined) to be adverse to "looking" in principle, one won't see anything.
I guess that's the main problem for a whole lot of people these days.
Earlier I had mentioned one of the things that we could not know were the details of the universe beyond a certain distance, because the light from those parts of the universe has not reached us yet. In her response she mentioned the Hubbel horizon.
The horizon I was interested in is the "cosmic light horizon".
Sorry for the confusion.
Hank
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