What Is Man?

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:

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

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.

Thank you so very much for all of your kind words! I had precious little to do with post 17, though. I prayed earnestly for His guidance and was drawn to those particular Scriptures around which I plugged a few connecting sentences, over which I prayed yet again. So in the end, it is no surprise that the collection is a "witness to the glory of the Lord":

But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, [even] the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me: - John 15:26

I certainly agree with you that there is more to man than meets the eye and his role in the cosmos is much more significant than we yet understand.

IMHO, it is instructive to consider how Paul reasoned with the Greeks in Athens with reference to man and his relationship with God.

The people in Athens had dismissed the wisdom of the great philosopher Plato and embraced the superstitions of their poets for their theology. Paul reasoned with them, correcting their error first by dismissing Aristotle’s view that there was no beginning, i.e. “everything always was what now it is.” He then went on to illustrate how their own poet's (Aratus) words which they embraced, would refute their concept of Who God is and what is man:

Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, [Ye] men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by [that] man whom he hath ordained; [whereof] he hath given assurance unto all [men], in that he hath raised him from the dead - Acts 17:22-31

Of course, science now affirms that there was a beginning. And even all the various theories of multi-verses, imaginary time and ekpyrotic cosmology still require a beginning. In itself, it is a strangely theological statement to have come from science (Interview with Robert Jastrow.)

betty boop, your reasoning with others concerning epistemology and ontology is very much like Paul’s IMHO. He was able to show the assertion of the poet as a rebuttal to itself. Kudos to you, my friend!

Hank,

Great citation from CS Lewis. While I have the greatest respect for Plato, I am afraid that he may have been tempted not to look in the cupboard, but simply to reason about what was in it.

At the same time, I think all of his reasoning about the realm outside the senses had the same purpose that much of Aristotle's thought did - to lead man to the good life. In fact, there are times when he seems pretty self-consciously to say "I know we can't know any of this, but let me tell the story, and you draw the lesson from it." For example,
near the beginning of the Phaedo, where Socrates talks about reworking some of Aesop's fables. And a good lesson it is.

To betty and Alamo-Girl, and Hank, I guess I believe that there are virtuous pagans (perhaps Hank is one - he seems to be virtuous at least) who can live well without Christianity. Again, St. Paul seems to suggest the way to that when he appears to talk in Romans about those who have never heard the Gospel, but who know there is a God through what we would call natural reason, and who are judged according to their consciences.

Now whether living well is enough is yet another question. I think one can live well, but to be truly human - to realize one's end - is only possible when one lives according to that end. So far, so good for Aristotle, I think, but where he thought the end of man was happiness defined as an activity of the soul according to what makes man fully man (as I read it at least - rationality, community, friendship), we Christians would throw in that the end of man is communion with his Creator, and that this communion is made possible through Jesus Christ.

Through the senses, we don't know everything there is to know about Christ, of course. We do know that he had a body, which was touched. We do know what the apostles heard and what they saw, and in the case of St. Thomas, what he felt when he placed his hands in Christ's wounds.
We know there was an actual physical empty tomb in an actual physical place, and we know what was physically in it (and not in it!). Without our senses, we would have no Gospels to read or hear. So through our senses, we do know Jesus Christ as he appeared on earth.

For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, Christ is also known in part via the senses - through the Eucharistic feast, and the Holy Spirit is received via the water of baptism and the oil of chrism. I recall that my dad who was a Southern Baptist minister was ordained when someone physically laid hands on him, an act of the senses that had a spiritual meaning.

But now I'm getting way off the point. All of this is quite different than the kind of irrationality that we so often confront nowdays. Some of it is found in Christianity, when folks insist on making their private experiences normative for everyone else, or when it is suggested that because we have revelation, there is no need for reason. Much of it is found on our campuses, as when it is suggested that any work of philosophy or literature is really an expression of the writer's subjective will to power or desire to oppress, or that there is no such thing as human nature, or that reason itself is a tool of oppression.

Not that I'm accusing anyone who has been part of this discussion of anything like the above.

Thanks again.

While I have the greatest respect for Plato, I am afraid that he may have been tempted not to look in the cupboard, but simply to reason about what was in it.

Yes. Or else, like Kant, he did look in the cupbaord but believed the cat was only an illusion created by his ability to see. The question is, which is worse, to not look, or to look and not believe what you see? Neither is good.

... I believe there are virtuous pagans ....

I don't. There aren't many viruous Christians, either.

...to be truly human - to realize one's end - is only possible when one lives according to that end...

Yes. That is correct, though, as stated, it seems somewhat circular, "to be a man one must be man." The meaning you intend is nevertheless true.

Out of curiosity, except for perceptual consciousness, by which I mean all that is usually meant by "the senses," (seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting) but also all other direct conscious experience, the internal "senses" of pain, neausea, vertigo, etc., as well as the emotions (which are only our perception of the complex general physiological reactions to the content of conscious at any moment), what else can be known, and how? If we cannot be conscious of something, how can we know it?

Usually examples are given of things we are not directly conscious of, like atoms or electrons. But, in fact we are conscious of them directly in everything we see and feel, we just do not perceive tham as atoms, but without them there would be nothing to see or perceive, in fact, we would not be either.

If there is some means to knowledge that does not originate in our direct conscious perception (the only consciousness we have), we ought to be able to have that knowledge without that which concsioucsness is conscious of, namely, material existence. If, for example, we can know about God without any physical means (which is how perception works), then why are physical means employed? Why must there be physical Bibles, why did Christ have to come, "physically," and why do Christians have to witness using physical literature and physically spoken words? (Sound waves are physical.)

I'm not making an argument here either way, only asking the question, so you can make the arugment.

Another thing C.S. Lewis said is that God loves matter, else He would not have made so much of it.

Hank

Thank y'all so much for giving me a heads up to your post! And thank you both for sharing your insight!!!

With regard to the cat-in-the-cupboard metaphor, from the Spiritual point-of-view, I assert that anyone can look but not everyone can see. Likewise anyone can listen but not everyone can hear.

The Bible is just text to those who read with the eyes, but to those who can and do read in the Spirit, it is alive. To one who cannot see, Jesus was a good man, but to those who can see, He is the Word of God made flesh.

We can use reason to encourage someone else to look or to listen, but the power to see and to hear is a gift of God.

On the other issue, I also believe it is possible for an atheist to live well and at peace with his neighbors. Good conduct is one of the results of Christian faith, but it is not the purpose of it.

The purpose is the restoration of the family of God, according to His will. What made it necessary is the banishment of man from the family for disobedience to His will. Willful disobedience cannot happen where there is absolute, unconditional love.

Hank, I don’t recall ever labeling you a “pagan.” I do not wish to judge you at all. But if you say something of yourself, I will take you at your word.

[bb] Certainly Truth itself is not available to sense perception.
[HK] 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?

I don't know Hank, why don't you tell me: Is a true-or-false proposition, such as this one regarding the status of the cat, exhaustive of what Truth is?

Let's take another cat example, Schroedinger's cat in this instance. Whether the cat-in-the-box is to be found alive or dead fundamentally depends on a probability distribution. Observation causes one only of that entire probability distribution to be "selected," and this is the only result (dead or alive?) that can be learned by that observation, and it can only be learned as a function of observation.

But what of the rest of the probability distribution? Because some other probability was not realized at "state vector collapse" does not necessarily mean that it becomes unavailable as a possible selection at the next observation.

A "truth" that focuses on, and is defined by, such low-level true-or-false propositions, it seems to me, is a truth that is incapable of embracing the totality of what is and what may be, which we might call one vast, eternal, cosmic "probability distribution."

Truth either pertains to this universal probability distribution, or it is not truth.

BTW, I had a chance to study your fine essay this afternoon, and to try to play a bit of catch-up with this thread. I owe so many replies! And certainly I owe you one, Hank, considering the time and effort you obviously invested in your essay.

I'll be back! (Gotta go make dinner now.)

First you quoted the following: [bb] Certainly Truth itself is not available to sense perception.

[HK] 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 cupboard. 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?

Then you asked: I don't know Hank, why don't you tell me: Is a true-or-false proposition, such as this one regarding the status of the cat, exhaustive of what Truth is?

No. But, if you are serious, you are being a little disingenuous. My response was to your statement, "Certainly Truth itself is not available to sense perception." You did not say "all truth," but simply truth.

When one swears in court to tell, "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth," no one supposes they are swearing to tell all the truth there is, exhaustively. What trial would ever be finished?

Our main difference is very fundamental. In some sense you regard truth as something, if not "metaphysical," then at least very nearly metaphysical. I think it is because you, at heart, are a Platonist and believe in Platonic universals as actual ontological existents.

I regard truth as entirely epistemological. Truth has no meaning outside the context of conceptual knowledge, and is the quality that differentiates those concepts that correctly describe any aspect of reality from those that do not.

As for a "truth that is [capable] of embracing the totality of what is and what may be, we might call one vast, eternal, cosmic 'probability distribution", no such truth is possible, because no single statement, however complex can describe everything there is to describe. In the abstract, all of truth may defined by a single statement, "truth is that which describes reality." One thing that certainly is not that truth is, "probability distribution," which not only cannot explain everything, but cannot very well explain what it does explain (thus the uncertainty principle).

The belief that "quantum mechanics" is somehow the ultimate explanation of everything, both metaphysical and epistemological, is just the new version of pythagoreanism. Pythagoras was convinced the everything could be explained as "number." The discovery of incommensurables cured them.

The new pythagoreans, however are more stubborn, and blatantly admit, their method cannot determine both the position and energy of a particle at the same time, and suppose that failure is proof they have explained everything, when all it does is reaffirm what the pythagoreans discovered long ago, everything cannot be explained in terms of measurement and number.

All of mathematics is only a method of dealing with a certain aspect of reality, that which can be counted and measured. It is a very powerful method, but limited by its essential nature. There are many aspects of reality that are neither countable or measurable. Mathematics is useless in dealing with those aspects of reality.

Science proceeds almost entirely by means of mathematics, especially physics and chemistry. Few aspects of science involve counting alone, and almost all important principles of science involve measurement. Now measurement is always arbitrary (no unit of measure is absolute, and must be arbitrarily chosen on the basis of what seems most appropriate and useful), and, unlike counting, which is absolute, no measurement is ever absolute or absolutely accurate. They are not absolute because all measurement must be made in terms of the relationship of that which is being measured to an arbitrary unit of measure, and no matter how accurate our measurements are, there is always some "margin of error."

No mathematical explanation of existence is either complete (it leaves out all those aspects mathematics is incapable of dealing with) or accurate (because there are aspects of reality that can only be known in terms of their measurable qualities, which can never be measured with absolute accuracy). A, "wave function," is a method of resolving certain "problems" statistically, and are based entirely on the observation that certain behavior of some "particles" or "waves" (because the same things are described as having both properties), can be described in those terms.

I have no desire to minimize the importance of this or any other scientific discovery, but this is hardly a means of understanding the ultimate nature of existence, or reality, or, "the totality of what is and what may be."

The so-called, "collapse of a wave function," is nothing more than a mathematical manipulation, akin to finding the derivative of a function in the calculus. It is not a physical event and it does not cause anything. It is only a way of describing what happens, it does not make anything happen.

You know I am not trying to dissuady you from your views. This is only to explain why I do not agree with them, and to provide you with actual points in my view that you can address, if you choose to argue with them.

How dull it would be if we all agreed all the time.

Hank

And to follow up on my previous post, I'm not suggesting that there is some kind of unbridgable dichotomy between faith and reason (as alot of folks seem to think today when they talk about religion vs. science), or between reason and revelation so that ... faith and revelation are [held to be] ultimately unreasonable. Nor am I suggesting that faith should not be subject to an examination by reason, or the other way around...

On the other hand, I agree with Hank that there is a certain amount of Manicheism and Platonism - I might say also gnosticism - that has permeated popular Christianity.

Cat baby, whar the hail is the basis that equates Plato[nism] with Manicheism?

There is nothing in Plato (or Christianity) that says "the world" of physical nature is (categorically) "bad."

After decades of study, I have found nothing in Plato that wants to "run away" from physis, that is, from natural bodily existence. In fact, the point I think he makes abundantly clear is that psyche-in-soma is indivisible in human existence -- that is to say, in human lived experience, mind (reason, consciousness) -in-soma (physical body) is seemingly innately understood as the process of becoming "itself" (that process of "in-between reality" that seeks to realize being in existence).

The two are parts of one synergistic Whole; and are therefore indivisible in principle.

Fast forward here to the famous curse of the modern age, that burning, seemingly irreconcilable issue first noticed by Rene Descartes. His was a take on reality that propounded a profound dualism in human life and nature, requiring the complete separation of body and spirit.

Plato would never have accepted Cartesian dualism as a reliable model by which "reality" might be reliably known and understood.

For Plato -- and later, Christianity -- the very notion of psyche-in-soma indicated a dynamic, synergistic whole constituted by seemingly mutually-contradictory parts.

For Plato, the "parts" of spirit and body may not be separated, detached from each other. For the "complete picture" of human and natural reality depends, in the long run at least, on the proper correspondance and correlation of two divinely-ordained principles that express and realize the divine paradign, "set up in heaven" -- described by the very language of the formulation, "psyche-in-soma."

So if you want to say that gnostics and Manichees espouse cosmic dualism as the reality behind nature and human experience, well, you're protected by the First Amendment. Plus you probably have a good deal of evidence on your side.

Just please don't impute this result either to Plato or Christianity. Neither espouses dualism in any way, shape, or form. Both seek the One source that alone makes intelligible what is actually seen in human existence and experience, as reflected and meditated by men who seek wisdom.

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The Platonic Soul

The Great Hierarchy of Being