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.
I don't know. Personally, I get seasick well within sight of land. I think motion sickness is related to what goes on in our inner ear, which is something that the free-fall motion of the earth through space wouldn't affect at all.
Maybe so, PH. But I wonder what the world looks like to, say, an ant, or a crow...just curious.
Shifting gears from physical perception to perceptions we form wholly in our minds: We may all be dealing with the same reality, but it sure is amazing to me that we have so many different interpretations of it -- i.e., "worldviews." Sometimes it seems that worldviews can be so far apart that it's difficult to find a common language in which to speak of "reality" at all.
Case in point, from an outstanding article by Paul Johnson, in National Review (Oct. 13) on the newist "ism," Pessimism:
"Pessimism...is a critique of society, also a habit of mind, an instinctive reflex, a paranoid psychosis, easy to acquire and to express, highly infectious, which can be made to apply to everything the established order does and produces.
"Karl Popper, in his analysis of pseudo-scientific theories like Marxism and Freudianism, pointed out that their attraction lay in their apparent universality: They could be made to apply to almost any human event, collective or individual, providing explanations sufficiently coherent to satisfy educated people disinclined to inquire too deeply into difficult phenomena, and who merely want a quasi-religious creed in which to believe. Pessimism fits beautifully into this category. It applies to everything, simple or complex. It has coherency, consistency, and self-righteousness, and affords huge intellectual and emotional satisfaction to its believers."
(I posted this elsewhere yesterday, but really wanted it on this thread.)
Examples of this "ism" as they are currently expressed in our society: "George Bush is an incompetent, stupid, lying loser who can't do anything right; he is screwing up foreign policy, and making our friends and allies hate us. He only cares about the rich, and pushing America's weight around." "Global warming is gonna kill us pretty soon." "All senior officers of private corporations are lying, greedy crooks who cheat their stockholders." "Iraq is a quagmire, a second Viet Nam." "Conservatives want to destroy civil rights, set women's rights back to the Stone Age, and abuse minorities." "Morality is nothing but oppression designed to maintain the power of the status quo." Etc., etc.
In other words, the most negative and worst-case spin that can be attached to any person, circumstance, or development is the best one.
And you can read it all at the (incredibly influential -- why???) New York Times, the Oracle of Pessimism.
How does society find a "common language" when language has become merely rhetoric?
This sounds exactly like the problem that Plato encountered in his beloved Athens, in the persons of the Sophists -- master rhetoricians bent on justifying (for pay) such claims as "justice is the interest of the strong."
I guess I'm rambling. Must ramble into my forthcoming diatribe on the Republic. I'll be back!
Motion sickness or, more correctly, motion maladaptation syndrome is a condition that occurs when people (as well as fish and other animals) are exposed to real or apparent motion stimuli to which they are unfamiliar and hence unadapted (Benson, 1988). It has been recognised for more than a century that the term 'Motion Sickness' is a misnomer. Motion maladaptation syndrome is merely an indication of intact vestibular function and, as such, should be regarded as the norm rather than the exception...
The classic theory explaining the causation of motion sickness symptoms is that of Neural Mismatch. The theory is based on work from over a century ago (e.g., Irwin, 1881; James, 1882; Pollack, 1893) but it has only gained wide acceptance since it has been promoted in publications by Reason (1970, 1978), Reason and Brand (1975) and Oman (1982). Neural mismatch generally occurs when there is a conflict between signals received from either the visual system, or the vestibular systems and other gravireceptors. However, it can also happen when these signals differ from those expected by the central nervous system (CNS). It can also occur due to conflicts within the vestibular apparatus, i.e., between the semicircular canals and the otoliths.
It's obvious that the management considers some posters beneath notice.
I donno. Fish don't worry all that much about falling. It's only us land-dwellers that need to be concerned. My immediate response is that if any such creatures were oblivious to falling, they might not survive all that well. We're the descendents of those who got it right.
I had not considered Pessimism in that aspect, but it certainly makes sense. And the New York Times would surely be the trend setter, with the other conventional media following their lead.
It is challenge to even find optimistic news these days, perhaps because people are willing to spend more dough for Pessimism. How many times have we been trapped in a traffic jam as drivers rubber-neck to see the accident on the other side of the highway?
I also agree with you about the language problem. It was bad enough that we had to invest enormous time in culling the "spin" - but now, thanks to the Clinton years, even the common words ("is") must be questioned. What does it mean, and what does it really mean? Sigh...
Yes. In a way, that's really a metaphor for what goes on, all the time -- not just with gravity, but with everything we need to survive. A few days ago a baby squirrel somehow found itself in my back yard. Presumably it tumbled from some overhead branch. The dogs knocked it around a bit before I could attempt a rescue (by placing it over the wall into my neighbor's yard). Despite my intercession, I suspect that squirrel won't be passing its genes on to the next generation.
Yes! Very astute.
Hank
PatrickHenry replied: 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
This is a very important point PatrickHenry has made, and it actually contradicts what betty boop seems to be saying. (Sorry bb!)
Perception is not, "objectifying," at least in the sense that it is what determines "objectivity." It is reality that is objective, regardless of how it is perceived. It is objective because it is what it is independent of anyone's perception or knowledge of it. (I am speaking strictly in terms of human consciousness.)
I also have the impression that bb's view of perception is the Kantian, or what is sometimes called the "computer model".
I have that impression, betty, from this sentence, "What we 'see' seems to be what mostly constructs reality for us." I suspect you think of percepts as something created in the mind/brain with data delivered to it by the nervous system, the way a computer creates images from digital data delivered to it via sensors or a digital camera.
Now this view is not totally incorrect. Certainly our perceptual consciousness is associated with the brain, and certainly the reactions of the nervous system to external and internal stimuli end up affecting reactions in the brain. The part of the description that is most likely to be incorrect the supposition the nervous system is merely transmitting data, and the what the brain is doing is merely processing that data. The actual process is probably infinitely more complex and much more like an analog system of interaction than a one-way digital transmission system. It is also likely that perception is not isolated to specific points in the brain, but an aspect of the whole neural system. (This is one reason simply stimulating nerve endings does not produce the same percepts those same nerves normally stimulated do, and why cochlear implants, for example, cannot reproduce naturally heard sound.)
In any case, what perception does not do is "make-up" or "construct" percepts. Perception, however it works, is our direct awareness of material existence. Perception is not cognitive (i.e. it provides no knowledge). It is only our means of being conscious of existence (including our own). Knowledge is about that which we are conscious of. (Not making this distinction has gotten most philosophers, like Russel, for example, in lots of trouble.)
Here is something for you to chew on, and a challenge:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PERCEPTUAL (e.g. optical) ILLUSION!
If you do not already know this, please challange it.
I'll give you a hint why this is true. Perception does not know anything, therefore; cannot make any mistakes.
This business of human consciousness is terribly important. The views of Kant have so corrupted philosophy with his repudiation of consciousness, no field of philosophy today infected by that corruption (which is most of it) is sound.
Hank
This is very fascinating to me. Even flagella seem to know up from down but they aren't really sure how. I'm particularly curious how evolution theory explains the rise of graviperception.
I'm hoping one of you may have a clue -- url, phrase, word or whatever --- to help me know where to look for more information.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.