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.
Thus Spake Hank Kerchief
Think I should change my screen name to Zarathustra?
(I guess not. I really don't like Nietzsche.) Hank
I'll start out with the way I ended the other.
I know if you thought for one second any of your views or practices would harm another or were in any a way compromise with evil, you would immediately drop them. I know you believe you veiws are totally benevolent (and totally correct, of course, or you wouldn't hold them).
But, they are mistaken. Every failed society in the history of the world has been the result of trying to implement some variety of the views you hold.
Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, [were] idealists....
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.
Of course they were evil, but they did not gain power by promoting themselves as evil. They did not say, "put us in power and we will be brutal, vicious dictators who will turn your world into a hell." No, they promised peace, prosperity, equality, and, except for Pol Pot, these were the ideals these leaders held and believed their ideologuies and policies would actually fulfill, at least in the beginning of their careers.
This is not what "balance" is!
You flatly repudiated, "an extreme preoccupation with the discrete, individual self," and said, "balance is needed." If strict individualism by itself is unbalanced, it must be balanced by some form of collectivism.
I made some more comments about liberty, but do not think they were edifying enough to repeat. This only I'll say, if I cannot feed myself and free myself, than I am no value to myself or to any other individual in society. Only if I am independent enough to live without a society, do I have a moral right to be part of a society.
Hank
That's surprizing, your Post 155 reads like a will to power type thing. No offense intended, I actually like Nietzsche even though I disagree w/ him 100%.
I did enjoy your comments on "real" numbers. I've always been fascinated by i, not simply because the number makes no sense and yet is indispensible, but also because of it's mirrored relationship to "I". Could it be JUST an English thing?
When Moses asked the burning bush "Who are you" and the bush says "I am" it seems to me that God said all we need to know about Him and at the same time provided to us the ultimate goal; that is to move towards "I" such as He is and not merely the impossible, imaginary i that we all unfortunately happen to be (even those who will it otherwise).
Hank, this statement is a nonsequitur: The conclusion does not follow from the premise. In my view, "strict individualism," or "unbalanced individualism," leads to personal and social disorder. When conditions of disorder on a mass scale obtain historically, as they did in ancient Athens, and as they arguably do now, inevitably the tyrant steps in on the pretext of "restoring order." If conditions are bad enough, the populace (in its disorder) may actually welcome the tyrant. But not all tyrants are collectivists.
How can it possibly do that. Remember, a strict individualist is self-sufficient and never uses coercion against anyone else. Tell me how that leads to personal and social disorder.
Hank
I can agree a bit more with your expanded explanation: a Spiritual joining rather than physical.
But fading fast!
I've always been fascinated by i, not simply because the number makes no sense ...
Oh, but it does make sense. I know "i" stands for imagninary (although in electronics they use "j" for the same concept), but it is not imaginary, it is just a way of getting around a limitation of mathematics. A lot of mathematics is like that. That is really what the whole of the Calculus is about, though most mathematicians would be scandalized by that suggestion. At least this is true for derivatives, I havn't thought enough about integrals to be sure, but suspect its true because differentiation is just anti-integration.
I do not understand your I/i illusion to the burning bush. Human beings are not imaginary, but God might be.
Hank
But fading fast!
Yes! With obvious results.
Hank
Because the concept isn't capacious enough to describe human existence. Your definition seems to hold that self-sufficiency and nonagression are the prime characteristics of human being.
Well. Anyone with eyes can tell you, this is hardly the case in practical reality.
And then, you and I both complain when these exemplary and hoped-for conditions do not hold. As they quite usually do not, these days.
Hank, there's more I'd like to say here, but I really do have to go make dinner now. But I'll be back.
God, on the other hand is immortal, eternal and infinite. When God said "I am" it was a sublime, succinct factual statement of monumental consequence. The very existence of His being changes all things forever. He is the reason for all of this.
Conversely, when man says "I am" it reflects a temporary state of being, an existence transitory and subject to the smallest whim of fate, Nietzsche and Hank notwithstanding. He, man, is the i of that equation, the imaginary threadbare patch that barely reconciles a collection of disparate conflicting realities; the known and the unknown, being and non-being, id and ego, good and evil. Absurdus infinitas.
Man oscillates between these poles, never resting; seldom secure. My answer to bb's most excellent question, arrived at via this unusual path, was simply going to be; Man is Motion. And my implied question is; motion to what end?
i moving towards I.
Well then, I shouldn't worry much about what I believe or do, for how could it matter to a twinkle of light?
Does it matter what I believe? Does it matter what I do? Why?
Hank
I won't respond until you've had a chance to provide your whole answer. Remember, the question is how the self-sufficient individualist who never uses coercion against another is the cause of personal and social disorder. (By the way, Jesus and Paul [after his conversion] were both self-sufficient individualists who never used coercion against anyone, [those trouble-makers].
Enjoy your supper. (I'm in New England, the evenin' meal is always suppa'.) Hank
I'm, glad you asked. Man's motion can be directed. God the Father has established the goal, Jesus Christ has laid out the path. If we walk w/ Christ our oscillations become eccentric about positive poles; life, good, being, etc.
This is necessarily a conscious, deliberate decision. And it requires effort on our part. The more the effort the closer we move towards becoming eternal. What greater purpose can there be?
Obviously not everyone sees it this way. Many have chosen to make no decision or have consciously disavowed the eternal. What can they be thinking?
Purpose for what? What's the objective. A purpose implies an objective. What does one want or need to be eternal for?
Hank
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