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.
e-as ...
No. The ACLU says the First Amendment protects their right (( atheism )) to free speech, which the Second does not protect your right to keep and bear arms.
I was going to say they don't understand the concept that the militia is made up of the very people referenced in the text of the amendment. But they do get this, and very well. They simply know that when the people are completely disarmed, there is no impediment to the ... ACLU becoming --- a latter-day Politburo.
I'm telling you, gather weapons and ammo now while you still can.
50 posted on 03/28/2002 4:02 PM PST by Euro-American Scum fC ...
Here's the ... solution !
I suggest (but certainly can't prove) that if all of us had to fly, and if our flights were always high-risk dogfights and the like, the children of the survivors would be the product of a "Darwinian filter," and would go on to breed terrific "seat of the pants" flyers.
That's an ancient subject of debate. Do we perceive reality directly, or do we just make a mental map -- like Plato's cave analogy would suggest?
I think it's a bit of both. To some extent, the world we perceive is something like watching the image a robot sends back while it's exploring a mine shaft or something. We're not really in the shaft. We're only receiving images.
On the other hand, when we're actually in that shaft ourselves, our brains are still mapping things that our eyes perceive, but there's more going on. Our bodies are in motion, which we sense directly. Our balance is affected. We know the extension and position of our limbs. We're getting tactile impressions from the walls. We feel the air flow. Lots of stuff is going on. It's far more than the sterile, indirect impressions we were getting from the robot probe.
So until we can be hooked up to something like Robert Nozick's "experience machine," we'll know the difference between direct and indirect experiences.
I've been following along as I get time, although the dueling scriptural passages were a distraction; when oh Lord will we learn that its not our differences that define us but our commmunion?
Anyway, of the resonance musings. I knew A-G that you'd be attracted to that based on things you've said in the past. To take it one step further I would mention here the "new" science being introduced by Wolfram. I believe the self replicating patterns are perhaps the truest explanation of reality yet put forward. Of course even his most intricate formula's are merely kindergarden fingerpaintiings compared to actuality.
The ever flowing source of these patterns (GOD) employs a logic so clear and pure that, as bb pointed out, to plumb that depth would be to loose oneself completely.
BTW, EB White had a very interesting description of an ant's worlview in "The Once and Future King".
(2) On the other hand, when we're actually in that shaft ourselves, our brains are still mapping things that our eyes perceive, but there's more going on. Our bodies are in motion, which we sense directly. Our balance is affected. We know the extension and position of our limbs. We're getting tactile impressions from the walls. We feel the air flow. Lots of stuff is going on. It's far more than the sterile, indirect impressions we were getting from the robot probe.
Of the two analogies the second is a little better. I cannot imagine what the basis for the first analogy is. As for the second, which I also do not think is correct, when aren't we in the shaft, that is, when aren't we perceiving existence by actually being in it?
I would be very interested in why you think perception is consciousness of anything else other than material existence. If perception isn't how you learned about material existence, how did you learn about it. I mean, if material existence is something other than what you perceive, how did you ever discover it?
One important note: I said "perception ... is our direct awareness of material existence," not reality. Reality is a much broader term including material existence. We do not directly perceive reality, only that aspect of it that is material existence. We do not, in fact, perceive perception, for example, which is quite real.
Hank
I'm winging it a bit here. The first analogy is an updated version of plato's parable of the cave, where he says that all our perceptions are indirect, like watching shadows on the wall. To the extent that our brains are mapping distantly seen objects, there is some of that going on. But Plato says that's the totality of our experience, and I think it's marginal. Even in the case of distant objects, we can approach them and perceive them more directly. Then we're in my 2nd scenario -- being in that shaft ourselves rather than watching the image sent back by a probe.
I would be very interested in why you think perception is consciousness of anything else other than material existence.
It isn't, except in the case of internally-generated delusions and dreams. But they're not perceptions, and usually we know the difference.
One important note: I said "perception ... is our direct awareness of material existence," not reality. Reality is a much broader term including material existence. We do not directly perceive reality, only that aspect of it that is material existence. We do not, in fact, perceive perception, for example, which is quite real.
Some very fine distinctions being made here. You make "material existence" a different domain from, and presumably a subset of, "reality." You say we directly perceive the former, not the latter. I'm not sure what this is all about. What is there in "reality" which is so different from "material existence" that we don't perceive it? And if, as you say, we don't perceive it, how do you gain your knowledge of it?
The Wolfram approach is quite engaging to me also! His observations of the unfolding of simple instructions to complex patterns makes a lot of sense in many areas, including biological autonomous self-organizing complexity. But I agree with you that the unfolding of the harmonics is integral from the inception of God’s creation.
Another consequence of Wolfram’s approach may be in our understanding of complexity and randomness. You might enjoy this article for more on that subject:
Intelligibility of the Universe / Chaitin
Thank you for the suggested reading! I'm looking forward to reading the ant's view.
This is a good and important question. I think it deserves a proper answer. I will try to keep it short.
Take these three words, existence, reality, matter, do they mean the same thing? Ask five different people and you will get five entirely different answers.
Here is how I use these words:
Existence is the broadest of the three. It means "everything." To make it clear, it means "everything that is," but that is actually redundant, because what "isn't" is nothing.
Reality also means everything that is, but has this distinction. The correct definition of reality is, "all that is, the way it is." The classical logicians talked about "modes" of existence, and it is that concept that is meant by the phrase, "the way it is." What it means is this: rocks, trees, people, all exist as material entities, but history exists too, as does science, but they do not exist as material entities. Dostoevsky also exists, but only as a historical figure, and Stavrogin also exists, but only as a fictional character in one of Dostoevsky's novels. These things all exist and are real, but they to not exist in the same way and their reality is only true if the way they exist is specified.
Is Stavrogin real? Yes, if you mean as a character in one of Dostoevsky's novels. No, if you mean as a historical character.
At this point, I can address your question about perception, and how we can know something if we do not directly perceive it. We do not directly perceive anything of history, yet we can know a great deal about it. We could not know anything about it without perception, and whatever we know about it came by way of perception (for example of the words in the book we read about it), but we cannot directly perceive anything in history. This is obviously true of fictional characters as well.
The examples of science are even better. Almost everything in modern science is incapable of being directly perceived. All we know about the sub-atomic world comes through perception, but we cannot directly perceive anything of that world.
By matter I mean, material existence, and by material existence, I mean, that existence we are directly conscious of, and by conscious of, I mean "perception." It should be obvious that the material existence we are directly conscious of is real, but not all of reality, since reality includes everything that exists, past, present, and future, including our most abstract concepts (as those in science and history) as well as fictions, so long as the nature of their existence is made explicit.
Hank
This experiment identified transcripts present or absent under gravitropic stimulation. That many of them were also present under mechanical perturbation was unexpected.
This space biology experiment had the unexpected result of precious little difference between peg growth at space gravity v. ground.
On first blush, it appears that although it has been known for 100 years that roots know "down" and leaves know "up" (etc.) - that the actual work to determine what part of that it is genetic “knowledge" or “memory” of gravity – versus dynamic adaptation to gravity/motion stimuli - must wait for experiments which can only be done in space.
Am I close, Nebullis?
Well done. Now that you've explained your vocabulary, I agree with it.
Anyway, the purpose of this is to say that volition (or free will) isn't, to my thinking, a miracle.
On this we agree. There is no reason or necessity to appeal to QM, however, for this belief (nor does it solve anything anyway).
I never use the expression, "free will," because it comes from theology and is loaded with concepts that are incompatible with the meaning of volition. (The wrong meaning of "free will" comes mostly from Augustinianism and Calvinism.)
By volition, I mean that aspect of human consciousness that requires human beings to live and act by conscious choice. There is no question of whether human beings can choose. Human beings must choose. A human being cannot think, or act.
Here's something from The Autonomist, "Philosophy - What Is It?", that explains what I mean:
It is the rational-volitional nature of man that requires everything we do as human beings to be done by conscious choice. Even to do nothing requires a choice.
| Before we go any further, let's get something out of the way. As soon as you mention choice, someone will bring up the question of, "free will." Don't ever get caught in that trap. The meaning of that expression is hopelessly muddled and has nothing to do with this matter of choice. "Do you really believe people have free will?" you will be asked. "You can't do just anything you want," it will be argued. "People's behavior is determined by many things, their heredity, their subconscious, their environment, their education, their economic status....blah, blah, blah." All of that has nothing to do with the fact that to do anything, you must choose to do it. You do not have to study psychology and philosophy for a million years to know this is true. You can test it for yourself, once and for all, and never have to worry about this question again. Sit down in a chair somewhere. (You'll have to choose to do it.) Now make one more choice. Choose not to choose anything else. Just sit there and let your heredity, or your subconscious, or environmental influences, or your education, or your money determine your actions. What happens when you do that? Nothing! If you never choose anything again, you will never do anything again; but notice, even to not choose you must choose. The ability to choose, which we call volition, is not about what can be chosen, or how one chooses, or why one chooses, but the fact that a human being not only can choose, but must choose, and that this necessity of choice cannot be avoided or bypassed so long as one is fully conscious. |
I would post something about the true nature of cause, but to do it justice would require something very long. As a short answer, the best I can do is to say, cause is not events causing events. The nature of cause is based on the principle that a thing is what it is, A is A, which means all existents have a specific nature that determines what they do. Since all events are only entities doing something, and what an entity will do is determined by its specific nature, the true nature of cause is in the nature of entities, not events. Cause is the expression of the fact that no entity can violate its own nature.
Hank
If your meaning of choice were the only meaning and not, as you point out, your own private meaning, it might have the limitations you suggest.
In "reality" choices are limited. One cannot choose to think about or invent from what they have no knowledge of whatsoever or have never heard of. One cannot choose what one does not know is available to choose. One cannot choose to do what is physically or logically impossible. They might say they have chosen to do it, but of course cannot. A choice presumes the thing chosen is possible.
I can understand why you might not like the word "choice," if you believe it has connotations which seem to have the kinds of limitations you suggest, but in philosophy, it has a very specific meaning quite different from that connotation. Another word might be used, like "selection" or "consciously assent to," as in, "human beings must select from all they can think of to do or say, which they will actually do or say," or "having thought of an action or thought, a human being must consciously assent to one before it will happen."
I don't think this reflects reality. There are in reality, opportunities for truly novel actions, truly new inventions, truly new things under the sun.
There is nothing about choice that precludes any of this. In fact, it requires the most rigorously carefully chosen rational thought to bring anything really knew into the world that actually works or is of any value.
Hank
There's a lot that is and can be done by increasing Gs by centrifugation. Most of the candidate genes and proteins that are involved in gravitropism are discovered this way. Plants are a good model to study tropisms. But gravity affects all living cells, not just plants and bacteria with flagella. It isn't so remarkable that something that has a definite physical effect on living organisms is part and parcel of what that organism is about.
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