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.
"The world is controlled by volition..."
The Universe is controled by volition.
Conscious beings by their volition that are millions and possibly billions of years more advanced than Earthlings who eons ago achieved optimum-health biologic immortality. That's where we on Earth are moving -- by volitioon -- to join -- the civilization of the Universe.
I think we're just barely intellegent enough to survive. Sort of like there's just enough oxygen to support life and the balance of the universe is fined tuned to just be what it has to be.
Even now, there are problems that seem unsolvable. The fact that we always manage to somehow survive points to the truth that our collective intellegence is "just right".
:^)
Then on the other hand, one could convincingly argue that man is hardly lacking, let alone destitute of, real choices in life, absolutely every day we breathe air.
I gather this is still an [the???] open question? Or are we to concede that the dogmatists of whatever stripe out there have shut down this problem forever, with their ever neat and clever adumbrations of so-called reality?
A dogmatist-- assuming he's not the dictator in a theocracy -- can only shut down the problem as far as he is concerned. But in this country, each of us is free to keep our options open. (But if someone wants to deny free will, I guess it's inappropriate to regard that as keeping one's options open.)
Do you imagine that the only dogmatists/dictators in human history have been of the "theocratical type"? If so, how do you explain the "usual suspects" -- the Lenins, the Stalins, the Hitlers, et al.?
Or is it that you lean to the broadest, most "liberal" definition of the word "theological?"
My guess is you could make such a case, thataway; but not without trashing something like 40 millennia of human experience and reflection of same in the process.
PH, you wrote: "each of us is free to keep our options open."
To which I might reply: "How many options, exactly, do you imagine the denizens of totalist regimes enjoy on a daily basis?" Do we folk living here in America perhaps tend to take a whole lot for granted, compared to other peoples?
Maybe just a different twist on the one argument being ventilated by the two of us.
But now it's sleepy-time for me; good night, dear Patrick! Pleasant dreams and (hopefully) see you tomorrow.
Shades of Agent Smith.
You're right, BB. Dictators of non-theological systems would also try to control the philosophical views of their people. I was thinking of recent events involving the taliban, and of much older events involving the inquisition, but of course the range of totalitarian disctatorships is far wider than that, and almost all of them would want to control how the people think.
No, they would just need an inexpensive, faster then light propulsion system, and lots and lots of room, within a few thousand years they would take up a number of galazies.
Apparently you assume that million-year-advanced volitional/conscious beings would be stagnant with the level of technology no greater than achieved by Earth beings.
Just from looking at our advances with quantum computation, quantum entanglements and nanotechnology it points to the highest probability that advanced technology beings transfer not the physical self or object, but rather, the information is transferred and the object or being is recreated at the distant destination. Near instantaneous recreation across the Universe making c a seemingly comparative standstill.
If every conscious being that has lived on Earth was immortal and continued to procreate since the discovery/invention of consciousness on Earth -- about 3,000 years -- there'd still be plenty of room in our solar system for additional procreation of volitional/conscious beings.
Nonetheless, with their millions-of-years or billion-of-years more advanced technologies, the ability to control the Universe implies the ability to create new galaxies -- perhaps even create Universes. Whatever it takes to preserve the most valuable entity in existence... The controller of existence--volitional/conscious beings.
It is estimated that if aging and disease were eliminated forever, the average lifetime would be 600 years due to other causes such as accidents.
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