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.
Well, grasshopper, man is the only living creature that God made that needs toilet paper(in some form)... No other living mechanism needs it... And to make sure you are clean you must look at it.
Well, since man is prone to arrogance, must be Gods way of insureing that man takes a look at and gets a noseful of his real days production, humbling him, unless hes too busy thinking up other arrogant thoughts..
Strangely enough, with the exception of a number of special classed of constants (e.g., Stoneham 1973, Korobov 1990, Bailey and Crandall 2003), the only numbers known to be normal (in certain bases) are artificially constructed ones such as the Champernowne constant and the Copeland-Erdos constant.
What is [a Christian] man?
He's different. He involuntarily perceives things that others cannot. Before he believes in Christ, he is already known to God and has been chosen. Only those who are chosen are able to hear the Word.
(I hope that I do NOT get a big catfight started here between the Calvinists and those who aren't...........)
Mind wandering here... (LOL!)
With regard to your mathematical invention - perhaps someday it will be to a physicist, the necessary means to reveal a physical law. That is after all what happened when Einstein was able to pull a geometry off-the-shelf to explain relativity.
Ultimately, whether we see your work as a discovery (Plato) or an invention (Aristotle) - is a matter of personal irreconcilable worldviews. To me, you are a discoverer.
Genesis 1:26-27
26. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Indeed, towards the end of the post is an acknowledgement that sincere contention exists between Christians because of personal interpretations and reliance on the teachings of others.
Moreover, we are all admonished to be careful not to confuse the commandments of God and traditions of men:
To the verses I added a few connecting sentences and prayed again. The result is the post that you see.
for sure.
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?
That is no ideal, it is surrender to evil.
Here we have the romantic picture of the Byronic individualist, manifesting an indominable will to always ACT, to always PREVAIL against ALL ODDS!
That is a real ideal.
Here is yours:
It also includes suffering. The Greeks had a name for this: pathos: Our human feeling for the suffering of other human beings.
Suffering is not an ideal, it is evil, it is a picture of all that is to be loathed, reviled, and despised. There is something despicable about making one's suffering and sores some kind of badge of honor to be lifted up as a claim on the lives of others. It is a sacrifice of virtue to vice, of the good to the valueless.
Pathos isn't about what a man does; pathos refers to what is "done to" a man.
No doubt that is what pathos is, and what is wrong with it. Life consists of what one does, not what happens to them. Things happen to a rock.
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...
The only thing wrong with societies is the material they are made of. Those societies comprised primarily of those who are concerned with, "what is done to them," produce Zimbabwe or Bangladesh. Those countries that are comprised primarily of those concerned about what they do produce countries like the United States of America. Take your pick.
I have seen the result of those who seek to solve the "problem of human society," Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, idealists seeking only to alleviate human suffering. And what is that ideal that has unleashed these horrors. It is the same as yours, "... that there really is -- ontologically speaking -- a human community, there really is a brotherhood of mankind ..." Its called collectivism.
I realized the relentless egocentric self-preoccupation of such characters seemed to border on the monomaniacal. I hardly regard them as "role models" myself. [Obviously] 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.
Balance, between what and what? Since it is the "individual self," that is to be "balanced" with something else, what is that something else. It is the community, the society, the collective anything that lays claim to more importance than any concern of a mere individual. Balance means sharing the wealth of the producers with those that do not produce, demanding "help," from those who make something of their lives through "actions," for the sake of those who make wrecks of theirs waiting for something to happen to them. Balance means sacrifice of the individual to any collection of looters, parasites, and thugs claiming to be "society".
While the relentless egocentric self-preoccupied monomaniacs of this world, like Thomas Edison, are producing those things that really do improve the lives of human beings and relieve human suffering (the amount of human suffering the light bulb alone has prevented is inestimable), it is the altruists, like Mother Teresa, who have never produced a single thing that relieved the suffering of a single human being, who are held up as "ideals." There is a reason why Mother Teresa's flourish in India, and Thomas Edisons flourish in the United States. It's called individual liberty, without which no other true ideal can possibly be realized.
(There is another reason, of course. Mysticism and superstition are dominant influences in India, reason is a dominant influence in the United States.)
Hank
Yes. That's why I start with the integers.
Hank
This is news to me, Hank. There is a distinction to note between an idealist and an ideologue. These men were the latter, plus brutal, vicious dictators, the very spawn of Hell.
I don't know how you could possibly interpret what I wrote as an endorsement or recommendation of suffering -- of pathos -- Hank. I was simply making an observation about the human condition. How could you spin it like that? Are you nutz?
Balance means sharing the wealth of the producers with those that do not produce, demanding "help," from those who make something of their lives through "actions," for the sake of those who make wrecks of theirs waiting for something to happen to them. Balance means sacrifice of the individual to any collection of looters, parasites, and thugs claiming to be "society".
Good grief, Hank -- are you joking? This is not what "balance" is!!!
...altruists, like Mother Teresa, who have never produced a single thing that relieved the suffering of a single human being, who are held up as "ideals." There is a reason why Mother Teresa's flourish in India, and Thomas Edisons flourish in the United States. It's called individual liberty, without which no other true ideal can possibly be realized.
Frankly Hank, I'm astonished at you. Talk about ideologues! If you actually believe this bunk, then I am completely at a loss to understand why you think you know what individual liberty is.
betty boop, I'm glad you and I share the same worldview.
Me too, Alamo-Girl. Me, too!
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