What Is Man?

Various | September 25, 2003 | betty boop

[betty boop]

The Platonic Soul

It is fitting to give Plato the first word on the question, “What Is Man?” For Plato was the first thinker to isolate man out of his connection to clan and tribe, making the human individual -- man as he is in himself -- a proper subject of investigation.

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.
 

The Great Hierarchy of Being

The Platonic answer to the question “What Is Man?” must take into account man’s place in the great hierarchy of Being: God-Man-World-Society. All the members of the hierarchy are in dynamic relation, mutually unfolding the cosmic pattern set up “in heaven” as an eternal cosmic process of being-in-becoming over time. Man’s place in the hierarchy is special; for man is the microcosm, or eikon (image or reflection) of the cosmic Logos manifesting creation as the intent of divine Nous. Man’s soul is the site of the intersection of time and timelessness, of the changing and the changeless, of being and becoming, of life and death, of the tensional play of freedom and necessity.

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.
 
 

[Mr.Atos]

Curiousity satiated. Now, I'm intrigued!

Thank you, Hank; both for your insights, and for the 'ping.' Thank you Betty-Boop and Alamo-Girl as well, not to mention the rest of you who have managed to incorporate more thoughtful insight into 40+ entries than I have seen in many books that I have read

Much to think about and ponder.

[bigcat00]

Thanks for your responses. As to Aristotle and the senses, there seems to be this distressing tendency in pop philosophy at least to jump from the fact that our senses may not correctly perceive everything possible(subatomic or quantum physics, for example - or is it just that we don't have the proper instruments of observation yet?) to the conclusion that there is, therefore, no truth. It seems that we all do in fact trust our senses most of the time, such as while we are driving down the freeway at 65 mph between two semis, unless we know there is a defect, in which case we do something like get a pair of glasses and compensate for it.

I guess the point for me is, that as a rational being (at least I like to think of myself that way), my senses are enougn to allow me to know the world and to draw certain conclusions from it based on my observations. To use an example, having observed lots of girls and boys (as a dad and a coach) one of my conclusions is that boys and girls are different by nature. That type of conclusion - in fact, the possibility of that type of conclusion - would be denied by some, who deny nature itself.

Now, as a Christian, I find much in Aristotle entirely consistent with Christianity. If God made the world, surely He made it in some kind of consistent, knowable way so we can get around and figure it out and make sense of it and of ourselves. We have a nature that we can know. One does not have to be a Christian to figure out that much, and Christians and others can have common ground to that extent (as Paul seems to suggest in Romans).

So, whether our senses are ultimately reliable to detect every possible phenomena seems to be a differnt question that whether they are reliable enough to do what I think both Plato and Aristotle were concerned about (and what the point of Christianity is to a great extent): live the right kind of life.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Thanks again for providing a great and thoughtful discussion.

[Joe Brower]

Man is the animal who can forsee his own demise.

[Hank Kerchief]

...there seems to be this distressing tendency in pop philosophy at least to jump from the fact that our senses may not correctly perceive everything possible(subatomic or quantum physics, for example - or is it just that we don't have the proper instruments of observation yet?) to the conclusion that there is, therefore, no truth....

Yes! It is absurd, too, because it implies, because we cannot not know everything, we cannot know anything.

Now, as a Christian, I find much in Aristotle entirely consistent with Christianity.

It is. I am not a Christian for the very reason that most (apparently not you) reject the rationality of both the Bible and Aristotle. (Please do not assume anything because I choose not to call myself a Christian, which today is the equivalent of Augustinianism -- a blend of Bible truth, Platonic mysticism, and Manicheian paganism.)

So, whether our senses are ultimately reliable to detect every possible phenomena seems to be a differnt question than whether they are reliable enough to do what I think both Plato and Aristotle were concerned about (and what the point of Christianity is to a great extent): live the right kind of life.

That's right, at least for the Bible and Aristotle, not for Plato.

Hank

[Hank Kerchief]

Man is the animal who can forsee his own demise.

Yes, and the only one that worries about it. It is one of the "blessings" of the rational nature.

One of the hallmarks of human rational nature are the unique emotional expressions which are mostly involuntary. "Man is the only creature that blushes, or needs to," Mark Twain said. Man is also the only creature that smiles, frowns, laughs, and weeps. He is also the only creature that worries, hopes, hates, or experiences nostalgia, guilt, (its cousin, regret), and pride.

While the animals do seem to exhibit bahavior indicating some emotional reactions we share, like fear, enthusiasm, and joy, all other emotional experiences are uniquely possible to man because he has a rational nature. The animals do not worry or hope, because they are unable to conceive of the future. They do not experience nostalgia or regret, because they connot conceive of the past. They do not experience guilt, shame or pride because they have no concept of values. The irrational creatures neither laugh or weep because concepts of humor and pathos are impossible to them.

No man has ever prevented his death by thinking about it, although some might have caused them that way.

Hank

[Joe Brower]

Correct. All of these things are a result of man being unique in the animal kingdom in having the capability to be objective as well as subjective. Not that this facility gets employed anywhere as much as would be useful... !

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for your kind words! I look forward to reading your views!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for your reply and for sharing your insight!

So, whether our senses are ultimately reliable to detect every possible phenomena seems to be a differnt question that whether they are reliable enough to do what I think both Plato and Aristotle were concerned about (and what the point of Christianity is to a great extent): live the right kind of life.

To the extent the Word informs morality, I agree with your observation. But I suspect you agree that the Word is much more than that. He transcends from the spiritual realm, which is altogether unmeasurable in the material sense - and thus must be understood spiritually and not mentally.

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where [is] the wise? where [is] the scribe? where [is] the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;

But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. - 1 Corin 1:19-25

[stuartcr]

I think it is safe to say that no one is correct, and/or will never be proven right or wrong. Why then, don't we all just say.."I don't know, and I never will know", and leave it at that? We are really not much different, in this aspect, than any other animal.

[betty boop]

As to Aristotle and the senses, there seems to be this distressing tendency in pop philosophy at least to jump from the fact that our senses may not correctly perceive everything possible(subatomic or quantum physics, for example - or is it just that we don't have the proper instruments of observation yet?) to the conclusion that there is, therefore, no truth.

bigcat, of course the senses are indispensable to us just to get around in daily life. And we humans trust them with a lot. (Even though there are times when, say, our "eyes play ticks on us.")

What I wanted to draw attention to however (perhaps the QM analogy was not the best way to do it), is the fact that there are real things that are not available to sense perception. Things like ideas, mathematical theorems, the laws of nature, theories of all descriptions, consciousness, emotions, the feeling part of sensory experience, time, etc., are real though perfectly intangible.

Eric Voegelin had a rather amusing term for such like: "non-existent reality." This sounds like an oxymoron; but it really isn't when you think about the class of "objects" that it describes. They are "real," just as the short list of things in the above specifies real things; but they do not have existence as physical objects available to sense perception.

People who want to make sense perception (understood as extended via increasingly sophisticated observational instruments) the criterion of what is real tacitly deny reality to a huge part of human experience and existence.

Such a definition of reality is really quite absurd. It results in a grotesque reductionism of nature and especially of human nature.

Certainly Truth itself is not available to sense perception. Nor is the idea of "living the right kind of life." And it seems that Plato, Aristotle, and Christianity all agree that you can't do the latter without having a conception or standard of the former.

So if it were true that these aren't "real things," because intangible and therefore unvalidatable by the senses, then what would be the point of human life?

[betty boop]

Make that "tricks on us". Sorry. :^)

[betty boop]

A-G, thanks for much for the link to "The Curse of Dimensionality." I'm looking forward to reading it!

[Alamo-Girl]

Great points, all! Thank you so much, betty boop!

[Alamo-Girl]

You're quite welcome! Hugs!!!

[RightWhale]

Physical Spiritual Emotional Intellectual Social

These are all items in the world. None of them are inner, although the psychic and the physical are often considered inner and outer. Inner is a third existentiall mode besides the psychic things. Teilhard, of course, thought there were only inner and outer, butsometimes confused psychic matter with inner.

[betty boop]

A belief that Adam was the first mortal man leads to the conclusion of young earth creationism. A belief that he was the first ensouled man leads to the conclusion of either intelligent design or theistic evolution.

Alamo-Girl, thank you so much for your magnificent essay at #17! It was moreover such a splendid and profoundly meditated witness to the glory of the Lord. Thank you so very much!

It is so interesting that knowledge of man and knowledge of the world are so often interrelated and interdependent. Witness Plato's "man the microcosm."

WRT to the above italics: I guess we'd call this an instance of the "anthropological principle" at work. While many scientists take a dim view of any "anthropomorphism," I think it's silly to tsk-tsk the anthropological principle. For all the knowledge that exists of man, God, and the universe is human knowledge, in the sense that the human mind (exclusively [except for God, of course] as far as we know) is the knower of it. Why would anyone want to insist that man is so insignificant, unimportant, on the great scale of the physical universe that it cannot be said that the presence of homo sapiens sapiens and his activity in the cosmos is other than perfectly trivial, and of little importance?

Man may well be much more important to the evolution of the cosmos than we now realize. So if people believe it's silly that the YECs and IDers could construct theories about the origin of the universe based on the issue of "first-mortal" vs. "first-ensouled" -- well, maybe they could benefit from a little more modesty about what it is they think they know.

Fortunately, God sets more store by man then most men do! :^) We ought to be profoundly grateful for that, and love and honor the Lord as He wishes us to do.

[Fester Chugabrew]

An article recently published in Concordia Theological Quarterly has a wonderful way of addressing the question, "What is Man." I hope to see the article posted at FR with a link once I get permission. For now, here is an excerpt (with a few extra paragraph breaks to make the reading a little easier):

An ancient and a modern heresy that the church again must combat is the view that death is natural. Such a view regards death as the last act of life, and as such, death is something over which we dispose. Such a view could not be further from the biblical understanding.

The Bible begins, not with a living man as though man lived self-evidently, but the Bible begins with the Creator, who speaks into existence man, who is made to exist by being made to live. Life is, therefore, a gift. Life, therefore, is not, so to speak, 'natural' to us. It comes to us from the outside, from God, so that even that which most "belongs" to us, namely our life, is itself not out own proper possession.

Precisely in our being made alive, our relationship with God is both begun and revealed: He is our creator and we are His creatures. To live is to be created. For this reason, Irenaeus could write that "the glory of God is a living man," for in the life of man the living God who makes by making alive is manifested. This "making alive," however, also reveals a will to make alive. It is God's will that man live.

While this is implicit in the creation story itself, it is made explicit in the Wisdom of Solomon: "God created man for incorruption . . . and made him in the image of His own eternity" (2:23). When, therefore, the early church spoke of God's creating, it spoke of God creating ex nihilo, "from nothing," and by that phrase the church meant that God creates purely by His will and command. A living man is the direct expression of the will and command of God.

From "Death and Martyrdom: An Important Aspect of Early Christian Eschatology" by Dr. William C. Weinrich

[betty boop]

...our knowledge that death comes to us all is certainly something which influences our lives in many ways, as well as our thoughts and our choices....

yes, gore3000 -- when it came to moral philosophy, that was Plato's main point. Confrontation with the idea of our own death, and the expectation of judgment for the quality of our life -- of our "existential level," so to speak -- was for him the great spur to the ordering of the soul by "virtue," according to the divine paradigm -- i.e., truth, love, wisdom, justice, beauty. As Christianity bids us to live in God's law of love.

Thank you so much for writing, gore -- I so enjoy your posts.

[betty boop]

Life is, therefore, a gift. Life, therefore, is not, so to speak, 'natural' to us. It comes to us from the outside, from God, so that even that which most "belongs" to us, namely our life, is itself not our own proper possession.

Wonderful, Fester! I've pretty much come to the same conclusion myself....

Of course, it's probably fairly easy for a person of materialist or objectivist persuasion to consider his life -- virtually indistinguishable from the body -- as just another of his personal "possessions," to be done with according to whatever he pleases. Therefore on this view, there's nothing fundamentally "wrong" with, say, suicide, prostitution, or substance addiction.

Please do ping me when you post the Weinrich article!

Thank you so much for writing.

[Hank Kerchief]

Certainly Truth itself is not available to sense perception.

C.S. Lewis once said, if you want to know if the cat is in the cupboard, all the reasoning in the world will not tell you. You have to look in the cubboard.

So if the question is, "where is the cat?" and you look in the cupboard and see her, declaring, "she's in cupboard," isn't that the truth?

If I want to know what the truth concerning the meaning of justice, neither my eyes or any other perception will tell me, but if I want to know the truth of what something looks like, only my eyes will tell me.

Otherwise (except for the Voegelin stuff) I think your analysis is correct. Concepts, even concepts of fictions are every bit as real as rocks and trees, but not real in the same way, and that way must be spedified if what we say about them, as real, is to be true.

Hank