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.
What a strange thread. I totally agree with you about letting the record stand, I know I can always learn from some of the dumb things I've said.
But don't consider this a total bust. After all , the theme of this thread is, "what is man?" and mayber we've had a better answer by demonstration than by argument.
I was going to make a suggestion about how you ought to have tried to keep this thread on theme, but then I got side-tracked as much as anyone else. I, for one would like to return to the original theme sometime.
Anyway, I forgive you for bing so mean, and saying all the nasty things you did --- (Just kidding, it's me that did that, not you. So thanks for putting up with it.)
Knowing what is serious and important means knowing what isn't. Not everything is serious, and some serious things are best laughed at.
Do you laugh when you read the Bible? Some of the greatest sarcasm in the world is in the Bible, and you ought to laugh when you read it. Here are a couple of my favorites:
This is the answer of the man who had been blind from birth who had been given his sight by Jesus. He is answering those Pharisees who had been badgering him and his parents trying to get something they could use against Jesus:
John 9:26-32 Then said they to him again, What did he to thee? how opened he thine eyes? He answered them, I have told you already, and ye did not hear: wherefore would ye hear it again? will ye also be his disciples? Then they reviled him, and said, Thou art his disciple; but we are Moses' disciples. We know that God spake unto Moses: as for this fellow, we know not from whence he is. The man answered and said unto them, Why herein is a marvellous thing, that ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine eyes. Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth. Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind.
I can just see those old stuffy Pharisees quivering with anger when he said, "will ye also be his desciples?" And did he ever put them in their place with that marvelous (and certainly sarcastic speech, ("why this is a marvelous thing...."), at the end.
The book of Job is full of sarcasm, but the best is Job to his advisors:
Job 12:2 No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you.
(Do you know anyone like that?)
Here is one I used on this thread:
2 Cor. 12:12-13 Truly the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience, in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds. For what is it wherein ye were inferior to other churches, except it be that I myself was not burdensome to you? forgive me this wrong.
But no doubt the champion of Biblical Sarcasm is Elijah:
1 Kings 18:26-28 And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made. And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked. And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.
Those old prophets of Baal must have been furious. Here they are cutting themselves and frantically seeking for their home-made god to do someing, and here's that fanatical prophet of the God of Israel taunting them, "you need to cry out louder. He's probably on the phone, or out hunting. Maybe he's on vacation or taking a nap. Yell louder. Yell louder!"
And here's one for this thread:
Gal. 5:15 But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.
Most people miss the sarcasm of this verse, but once you notice it, it becomes much more meaningful.
Hank
Odd .... some post less
...loose privileges
Style gets you under the radar.
End of story, right there, gshs. I said it before and I'll say it again: No more "she" attacks. After all this time, you have yet to lay any reasonable basis whatever for anyone to be concerned about a "she" invasion.
If you have nothing better to offer, please hold to silence.
Silence can be a most wonderful thing.
p.s.: If you doubt that, try listening to the music of Miles Davis the next time you let your hair down. Sketches of Spain comes to mind.
She is gone. Look at post #365
The good "she" is still with us. Justice is sometimes slow around here, but when it comes, it's decisive.
LOL, Hank! What a charming post. Thank you!
It appears that we have an opportunity to resume the discussion where it left off in the 100's. As I recall, the subject had to do with whether man could be complete within himself or whether his being was moot without consideration of God, society, other men, etc.
Or did we finish that one?
LOL, A-G -- who could ever "finish" that one! :^)
Before all this stuff hit the fan, I was intending to write to gore3000 about Plato's political thought in the Republic. But I'm not sure -- is gore still here?
It seems to me that the political thought in Plato's Republic would be relevant to most posters, whether actively posting or just lurking. Your insight would be particularly helpful since many have only been exposed to one point of view from the academia.
I see you also pinged Pietro and Phaedrus. That's great! I don't believe we fully discussed Pietro's resonance musings and I'd love to hear Phaedrus' take on the possibility and what has been tabled thus far.
Also, I see we have some scientists and mathematicians lurking on the thread who may have ideas on the resonance musings or Einstein's "reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one" which may be applicable to this more narrow question, "What is Man?".
Seems definitely applicable to me, A-G! What we "see" seems to be what mostly constructs reality for us. Or to put it another way, perception seems to be what gives reality its basic form in our minds. As such, perception is an objectifying process. It would follow that if our perceptual apparatus were different, or if it were capable of processing more than 3D of space and 1D of time, the world might look very "different."
It would certainly look different; but I don't think it would be different. Many animals have better senses than we do, and many have worse. But I suggest that we're all dealing with the same reality.
Likewise, we sense motion only on a very specific level. Is it that we are not able to sense the cosmic movement of which we are a part - or are we born with the sense and then subdue it?
The inverse is true as well. Are we unable to sense the motion within our members - or are we born with the sense and then subdue it? How would we know?
I believe the "cosmic movement" is essentially free fall. We wouldn't be able to sense that -- except as the local absence of motion. If I'm wrong in this, I'm sure our resident experts will be pleased to leap all over me with corrections.
You may well be right about free fall and cosmic movement. But isn't it the absence of a fixed reference point in the field of view that aggravates motion sickness?
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