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.
No, bb, Hank made a statement that I was contesting. He and I, I think, live in different worlds. As to yourself, the most heinous charge I could level at you is depth of insight complemented by eloquence. There isn't much about which we disagree, bb.
OK. Sorry for the miscue.
Hank, the high significance of the operator in quantum mechanics is that at some fundamental level a non-deterministic decision is made. This obviously involves free will of some sort. Were this not so, the math could describe it. This has been shown to be impossible. The mechanics of quantum mechanics (if you will) are not understood and I would go so far as to say they can never be understood in deterministic terms.
Consciousness and free will are thus alive and well within the physics profession, denial and dissembling by many physicists notwithstanding.
Hank, I think you said you're an autonomist/objectivist and I take you at your word. Trouble is that objectivism doesn't say much at all of significance philosophically. You live your life as a responsible adult because you believe its right. I respect that. But it's not philosophy. You're also a bit of a curmudgeon. And I like that. You also ride a bike. I like that a lot. Now you see, I am indeed following along, albeit mostly silently.
Hank, we are so far apart on our understanding of dimensionality, I really have nothing to contribute your discussion.
But for those who are interested in geometric physics and extra time dimensions, Cumrun Vafa of Harvard appears to be the name to watch. Here are a few of his articles:
SPARE TIME. Descartes gave us co-ordinate geometry, with its three spatial dimensions. Einstein put time on an equivalent footing, creating 4-dimensional spacetime. String theory added six more spatial dimensions, and M theory added yet one more for a total of eleven (see Update 329). Now Cumrun Vafa of Harvard has added still another----an extra element of time---to make the existing theories more compatible with each other. Because of possible side effects, such as faster-than-light travel or questionable causality (time would not be measured sequentially along an axis but would spread out into a plane), Vafa's "F Theory" has not found many adherents yet. (New Scientist, 1 November.)
Dualities as Geometric Transitions (pdf)
Doctor Stochastic, you said:
I am not an objectivist. The very first sentence of the page I linked to begins, "Autonomy is not a philosophy, not an ideology ...." I agree with much of what many objectivists have written, however.
...objectivism doesn't say much at all of significance philosophically...
If it doesn't say much, what does that say about all the people who so vehemently oppose it. If it's so innocuous, why worry about it? It's pretty easy to say, "well that doesn't say much about such'n'such. Just once, I would like someone who has actually studied objectivism to point to some specific assertion and explain what is wrong with it.
Now, I can do that. My disagreements with objectivism are primarily refinements, but objectivism does have two or three very serious flaws. There is no metaphysics or ontology, and in the area of politics it makes some major mistakes, actually of a collectivist nature. Objectivist epistemology has made the first real advances in that area of philosophy since Locke (because after Hume, the entire field was destroyed). There are flaws with the epistemology, (one serious mistake in their understanding of the nature of perception and a mistake in their understanding of definition relative to concepts, for example) but all are correctable. The most important contribution of objectivism is their explication of the true nature of concepts as "identifications" and nothing more, which sweeps away mountains of metaphysical and mystical rubbish.
You live your life as a responsible adult because you believe its right. ... But it's not philosophy.
The way I live my life is entirely determined by my philosophy. If I learn that some aspect of my philosophy is incorrect, and it bears on my values, choices, or actions, the way I live my life will change. I live according to principles based on my understanding of my nature and the nature of the world I live in. One of those principles is that the purpose of my life (and yours) is to enjoy it (not make it last as long as possible). That's one reason I ride a bike and consider it an act, among other things, of moral defiance. But, of course, that is not philosophical.
You're also a bit of a curmudgeon.
My wife and my kitties think I'm a pushover.
I am indeed following along ...
Quite. How would you like to write my biography?
So, please do not be so quiet, and tell us some more about you. What is your philosophy and what principles do you live by? I believe they must be interesting, because you are. For example, is you choice of a screen-name significant or fortuitous?
Hank
Sorry to be so scarce lately, A-G. Work life is frantic and may stay that way a while.
Personally, I think the question of dimensionality sets up the next frontier for the human mind.
More or less intuitively, I’ve proposed that, if there is a dimension beyond three of space and one of time -- 3D[s] + 1D[t] = 4D -- it may be a t-dimension, not an s-dimension.
But there is huge resistance to this proposition. If the fifth dimension is a time dimension, then all known laws of causality are thrown into doubt. The 4D world guarantees you a linear succession in time, past to present to future. Add another dimension, then what does the world look like?
It doesn’t matter, I suppose, whether the “next” (5D) dimension is of space or of time. Either way, bizarre results result. Consider the following, from the article you bumped me to (“The Curse of Dimensionality,” by Mario Koppen), which suggests that spatial dimensions are basically a “mental product”:
“...Poincare also considered the question about the three dimensional nature of our world, and he gives a surprisingly modern-sounding idea. According to him, a thinking entity, as ... human beings are, could assign to their world [whatever number of] dimension[s] they like, since all of them are mathematically equivalent. Thereby, the world appears to be an abstract premise for sensoric perception and muscular activity, and spatial dimensions are basically a mental product. The choice for three depends on the configuration of the human nervous system and the so-acquired evolutionary advantage. By using two 2-dimensional retinas, the movement of the two hands has to be monitored. A dimension of 2 would not suffice to perform such a control, and a dimension of 4 would allow for movements during which the hands may even shortly be disconnected from the remaining body. So, a dimension of 3 seems to be a good compromise....”
But if it were possible to have access to a fourth spatial dimension, a few “weird” things would become possible:
“-- It would be possible to directly perceive the interior of a body;
-- The content of a box could be taken without opening the box;
-- A node could be removed from a string without moving the ends of the string;
-- A body could be lifted without external forces;
-- A body could be moved into its mirror form….”
Koppen appears to argue that if there is a fifth dimension accessible to the mind, it is likely to be spatial, not temporal:
“…considering time as a fourth dimension is not the same as considering a fourth spatial dimension. While it is a good trick for describing relativity, it is [just not] more: We cannot move [back and forth] in time….”
Further he notes that “Up to now, there is no experiment known which demonstrates the fact of a merely 3-dimensional world, and also there is no fact known for which a 3-dimensional world would be optimal…. [And yet] simultaneous perception of different aspects of the same thing…would be a simple act for a four-dimensional (thinking) being….”
So Koppen basically rules out the possibility of any “extra” dimension being time (because of the “problems” that it introduces with respect to causality, the invariance of the time order); he suggests that if there is an extra dimension, it is spatial – which would then allow for the possibility of “simultaneous” perception “of different aspects of the same thing.”
But I can’t help but feel that this sort of thing, if anything, is an argument for an extra time dimension – the word “simultaneous” is the clue here.
Yet to visualize extra dimensions is extraordinarily difficult – perhaps because Poincare was right, that perception of dimensions is conditioned by the “configuration of the human nervous system and the so-acquired evolutionary advantage.”
Maybe it’s time for an expansion of consciousness, an “emergent property” that may provide a new “evolutionary advantage” for the human race.
Some day. :^)
“…considering time as a fourth dimension is not the same as considering a fourth spatial dimension. While it is a good trick for describing relativity, it is [just not] more: We cannot move [back and forth] in time….”
Over the years, more than one scientific theory had to hurdle that particular objection. Galileo comes to mind...
It also could host explanation for myriad paranormal phenomenon - from precognition to near death experience. And to top it all off, it is compatible with Scripture.
Yep, 'way too upsetting, A-G!
Yet perhaps the 4D block -- 3S + 1T -- can only be viewed as a plane from the fifth dimension (T the second). That way, since we "live" and "perceive" in 4D, we don't "notice" the brane-like quality of 4D. And since we don't "notice it," it is not "real" for us; that is, from our "perspective." Meaning Time is still perceived as linear and unidirectional for us. So we continue to experience time as a movement from past to present to future. And causation appears to be unaffected and unaffectable.
Just a wild speculation.... I'm reminded of Heraclitus' observation: "Nature loves to hide."
I think the same myself some days, Phaedrus! Is Hank really taking the position that there's no such thing as free will because "volition" is unavoidable?
Old joke in philosophy: It's because he had no choice in the matter.
PatrickHenry and I had quite a sidebar going on flying "by the seat of the pants." With super speeds, night flying and poor visibility - the pilot has to ignore his 'senses' and pay attention to the avionics.
I believe geometric physics puts the scientist in the same quandary. To understand it, he must ignore his physical senses.
Yes, but it's an old story. The solar system theory is certainly counter-intuitive. The earth seems quite stationary. Lesson learned: our senses have developed to be good enough for survival, but there's no need for them to have developed to the point where we can detect everything.
What puzzles me, however, is why we seem to have far more intelligence than we really require. Well, sometimes it puzzles me.
Thank you so much for the excellent analogies, A-G, PH! I think they really help us understand what the real situation is WRT the problem of another time dimension: It's essentially a cognitive problem.
Thank you for your reply!
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