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.
Very Aristotelian. That's how I see it also. I think BB has a different view.
Uh, second thought ... the concepts aren't actually part of the thing. They're in our mind, and we generate the concepts as we consider the characteristics of the thing. Or so it seems to me.
You're making too much of it. Tell me what a concept is. Do it without describing or naming the attributes of a concept.
Tell me what any particular concept is. Do it without describing or naming its attributes.
Of course you can't, because that is what anything is.
For example:
What is the concept "dog?" If I say, the concept "dog" is the concept that identifies four legged animals of the canine genus, (assuming it is correct) what I have just written are the attributes of the concept dog, namely, "an identification," restricted to "four legged animals," and "canines."
Hank
Well, this is a philosophy thread. We're supposed to use lots of big words to beat stuff to death.
Anyway, I said the concept [of dog] is in our minds, because if we all vanished, there wouldn't be any concepts. There would still be dogs, with all of their attributes, but no concept of "doginess."
Physically, only entities exist. Qualities, realitionships, and events are only qualities of entities, relationships between entities, and the action of entities.
Qualities (which in its broadest sense includes characteristics and attributes) do not have independent existence, and only exist as qualities of entities.
(So-called qualities of qualities are always conceptual abstractions and only exist epistemologically, not ontologically.)
Percepts have real, but not physical existence. The qualities of percepts exist only as qualities of percepts and have no independent ontological existence.
Concepts and conceptual qualities have no ontological existence at all. They only exist epistemologically.
Hank
So we should get a medal or something.
Anyway, I said the concept [of dog] is in our minds, because if we all vanished, there wouldn't be any concepts. There would still be dogs, with all of their attributes, but no concept of "doginess."
That's true, and there would be nothing to describe.
Hank
The thought always precedes and produces the act. Well, almost always ... ;-}
Not to get too nit-picky, but that definition would exclude people who, for whatever reason, are unconscious, people who are embryos, the severely and profoundly retarded -- not to mention, democrats.
Interesting point. Very interesting point. I'm not too worried about the "unconscious" issue, as I think there's no dispute that a sleeping, or drugged, or knocked-in-the-head man is still a man. But embryos, the retarded, and ultimately the brain-dead represent a field for discussion. (But I don't intend to shanghai the thread and convert it into an abortion or mercy-killing debate.)
As PatrickHenry (post #503) pointed out earlier, "Well, this is a philosophy thread. We're supposed to use lots of big words to beat stuff to death."
So I'd say you're right on target.
I posted the definition as an example of how the nature of a thing is whatever its qualities are, not as an example of a good definition. It actually is a good one, however. It does not exclude any of your examples, because "rational" does not mean "at this very moment behaving rationally," but, under all normal circumstances, the entity in question did, does, or will exhibit this quality, or would exhibit it, if some extrremity or abnormality did not prevent it.
(I am not sure, even with this explanation, Democrats qualify as human.)
(Have I successfully weaseled out this?)
(But I don't intend to shanghai the thread and convert it into an abortion or mercy-killing debate.)
Sure, sure, and I'm not going to say, "that's exactly what you intend."
Just kidding!
Hank
You want to talk about rocks and trees; and then of attributes, qualities, and characteristics; as if all these things denoted equal objective entities existing in the same ontological and epistemological space/time frame. And yet the first two and the second three denote entirely different orders or categories of existents in reality. And so, it seems to me, they may not rationally be equated for the sake of prosecuting an argument.
Sometimes I am not sure you and bb speak the same language as the rest of us.
What in the world does, "and yet the first two and the second three denote entirely different orders or categories of existents in reality," have to do with anything. Are saying rocks have no qualities or that trees have no attributes or that saying they do is some kind of epistemological mistake? How does saying, "if I want to describe what a tree is, I must say what its attributes are," possibly denote [trees and their attributes] are equal objective entities existing in the same ontological and epistemological space/time frame. Can we never, in the same sentence name something and its qualities without implying they have the same ontological and epistemological status?
I started this by saying, a thing is what it is. When "what a thing is," has been described, that is its nature. (What else would a thing's nature be?)
If I want to tell someone what this object I am holding is, I can only do so by describing it, by stating what its nature is, by enumerating its qualities and characteristics, which in this case is a, "red rubber ball." What is it's nature? Well, it is red, it is elastic, and it has a shape, which is spherical. Those characteristics are what a red rubber ball is. They are its nature, the kind of existent it is, a "red elastic spherical entity." If it were green, it could still be a rubber ball, but it couldn't be a red one. If it weren't elatic, it could still be a red ball, but it couldn't be rubber one. If it were a cube, it could still be a red rubber entity, but it could not be a ball.
Those qualities, red, elastic, and spherical, have no independent existence and only exist as qualities of the red rubber ball.
There is no free "redness" or "elasticity" or "sphericalness" running around free in nature. One cannot create a red rubber ball by gathering together some redness, some elasticity, and some sphericalness and plunking them together.
The nature of a thing is whatever it is, and it is whatever all its qaulities and characteristics are. Nothing exists without qualities, and no qualities exist except as qualities of existents. (If something had no qualities at all, it would not exist.) Everything that exists must be different in some way from everything else that exists, which means, everything must have at least one quality that is different form the qualities of every other existing thing. (Two things may have identical qualities in every way, and still exist, if their positional quality is different. Relative qualities are very important to existence.)
The notion that entities, or existents, of any kind, can be, in any way, separate from their qualities, or that qualities, of any kind, can exist, in any way, independent of existents is a huge ontological and epistemological mistake.
Hank
I have a tendency to look at most things geometrically - and to me this is plaid.
In the example, I envision rockness and treeness as lines of existence in one direction. And in lines which run perpendicular, forming right angles, are the attributes, qualities and characteristics.
Thus redness is an existence as is rockness, but in the opposing direction. A particular "rock" is some intersection of right angles of the plaid in multiple dimension.
I cannot say that betty boop sees it the same way that I do, but that’s my concept of physicality.
I'm sure that's true. But at the extremes there would probably be general agreement. For example, those rare cases where a baby is born with no cerebrum.
We, of course, are more civilzed. For retarded people who live on welfare, most females are required to take birth control pills in order to qualify for housing. I leave it to you to decide the morality of this. It is definitely utilitarian.
I know a slippery slope when I see one. I agree, this is a tricky area. Still, the genuine extremes aren't all that difficult. But they can't (or shouldn't) be used as stepping stones to the less extreme cases. Easy to say; tough to do. In the middle of the extremes are some of the most difficult topics in ethics. I don't pretend to have any universal answers.
Truth is not determined by how widely a concept is accepted. When first discovered, most truths are accepted by very few people, and no truth probably enjoys universal acceptance.
This is true for correct definitions as well.
Hank
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