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“When using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense,” Socrates explained, “the soul is dragged by the body into the realm of the changeable, and wanders and is confused.” However, when the soul returns to reflect upon its own nature, “then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives.… And this state of the soul,” he concluded, “is called wisdom.”
Heraclitus
“The idea of man,” wrote Plotinus, one of Plato’s most distinguished disciples, three hundred years after his death, “is formed after that which is the prevailing and best part of him,” namely his soul.9 This assumption bridged the classical culture of the Greek and Roman world and the Christian culture of the Middle Ages. It permeated the humanism of the Italian Renaissance and animated the great debates of the Reformation and the early modern era. Even today, when scientists try to reduce all forms of consciousness to bioneural states, the existence of the self remains an elusive mystery.
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The world we live in, in other words, is a world created by our systematic ignorance—and our unwillingness to see things as they really truly are.
Socrates describes the world around us as a darkened cavern, across the back of which a puppet show is flashed with the figures of men, animals, and objects cast as shadows. For a modern audience, the description has an eerily familiar ring. It’s the world of television and the media at its most flimsy and superficial.
At one level, we all become Platonists when we are conscious of our own shortcomings and weaknesses. We move through life aware we could be, or should be, someone different: someone more honest, more courageous, more compassionate. In Plato’s terms, this higher self is our own soul reflected in the light of the Forms.
another key dialogue, the Meno, aims to convince the reader that all knowledge is actually a process of recollection.
Still, for Socrates himself, the final escape from the cave comes only with death. The soul is finally free of the imperfections of the body and can reunite itself with all the categories of knowledge in their abstract perfection. In this sense, Socrates’s philosopher truly does make “dying his profession” and death a joyous moment of release from ignorance as well as life.
Still, the Myth of the Cave reveals a bitter truth: Most people prefer life in the cave. The world and institutions around us reflect it—and as Glaucon realized, people get upset and even furious when someone challenges their fondest illusions—what Francis Bacon would call the Idols of the Tribe—especially if everything else is collapsing around them.
the Timaeus is the crucial Platonic dialogue, preserved through the centuries. It firmly embedded mathematics and geometry in the Western understanding of reality and allowed Plato to solve the questions about the soul and God that Socrates had raised but never fully answered.
the human soul and its three parts—reason, emotion, and appetite—
And presiding over this complete and ordered cosmos is a God unlike any that has appeared in Greek thought, or indeed anywhere in history. It is a God who is a rational, beneficent Creator, who is pure spirit and pure mind. He is a Creator who occupies no existence in space yet presides over all things that occur in space and time. He is a God who demands from us not worship through ritual and sacrifice, but our mind’s assent to the laws and principles He has laid out for His creation.
This is a crucial point, which Plato missed in two ways. First, Plato’s theory of knowledge leaves out the possibility of change. Back at the Academy, Aristotle’s teacher constantly stressed that true Reality is by definition changeless and eternal. In fact, Aristotle was able to answer, change is part of what makes the world what it is and what allows form to reach its full potential.
One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle’s philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.
Here we arrive at one of the most crucial differences between Plato and Aristotle, and one of the most important for the future shape of Western culture. Plato’s philosophy looks constantly backward, to what we were, or what we’ve lost, or to an original of which we are the pale imitation or copy. In that past original, Plato will say, we find the key that unlocks our future. Later that most Platonist of epochs, the Renaissance, would look back to classical antiquity for its model of perfection, just as the Romantics—Platonists almost to a man and woman—would look back to the Middle Ages.
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Aristotle’s formula seems very simple. Yet how different from Plato’s! For Plato, true knowledge, including the knowledge of the true nature of pain and pleasure, solves everything. For Aristotle, it is possible to be good even if we don’t know exactly what we are doing, or why. The habit, and the behavior that flows from it, is enough to do the job.
“Freedom from any interference of government,” rather than submitting to its dictates, no matter how just, is one of Aristotle’s hallmarks of a democratic society.3
Over the centuries, Aristotle’s politics will lead the way for Western advocates of individualism and democracy, including America’s Founding Fathers. Plato’s communitarian vision points very much in the other direction, with ugly consequences. Yet curiously, both drew their arguments from the same vision of freedom in the Greek polis. Their disagreement arose over how to fulfill that ideal—and Western political thinking has been split down the middle ever since.
the Republic is in effect the first Communist state.
One big question about the Republic remains. Was it intended as a blueprint for creating the perfect society or (as some have argued) as a blueprint for totalitarianism? It is unlikely its author meant either one. Instead, the Republic is Plato’s answer to a single question, “What is justice?” meaning, how are we to regulate our dealings with others? A more colloquial way to put it would be “Why should I be good?”
From New Harmony, Indiana, to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, they are all efforts to create a brand-new society according to Plato’s basic premise, that through laws based on the highest and most certain knowledge, we can create if not the perfect society, at least a pretty fair copy.
thanks to the Syracuse experience, Plato’s late political writings like the Statesman and the Laws make more concessions to reality than his earlier masterwork.
For Aristotle, class conflict is inevitable. He spends nearly half the Politics talking about it. But this conflict is not a source of despair, as it was for Plato. Nor is it a sign that political disaster is looming. Instead, Aristotle’s science of politics is about learning how to build a harmony out of these competing existing parts through balance and moderation, rather than trying to impose order and harmony through rational legislation, as Plato tried to do in his Republic.
We can also translate thymos as righteous anger, the burning indignation we feel at the sight of a parent abusing a helpless child, or any wrongdoing and injustice. Thymos is the fire that burns in the heart of the activist, the reformer, the revolutionary, and the intellectual rebel.
Five years earlier, a Phoenician from Cyprus named Zeno preached a doctrine of moral austerity under the porch, or stoa, of the city’s marketplace. That gave his followers the name of Stoics,
Every Hellenistic philosopher insisted that life was about the soul’s search for the one crucial thing it did not have but which, once it was found, would make it happy. But what was that one thing? That’s where the battle began.
For Epicurus, our one friend is our body and the knowledge of the world it provides through the senses. Our one enemy is religion, especially any that promises rewards and punishments in the afterlife in order to keep us on the straight and narrow, instead of allowing us to seek happiness in this world.
Stoics taught that the key to the happy life is adhering to a strict sense of virtue and a rigid duty toward others rather than indulging in pleasure, and a renunciation of, or at least an indifference to, all worldly goods.
Diogenes’s quick wit and, dare we say it, cynical outlook disguised a first-class intellect focused on proving a single principle: that we have to own nothing, absolutely nothing, to be truly free. Diogenes was the first homeless philosopher.
Strato made two crucial decisions for the future of Western thought. The first was to insist that scientific research had to be free from any restraints by theology
the area of a sphere is four times the area of its greatest circle;
the area of a parabola (like the one described by a stone flung from a catapult) is four-thirds the area of the triangle enclosed within it.
On the whole, however, the Romans made bad detectives. They were perhaps the least curious people in history, as well as the most acquisitive.
By Cicero’s time, any Roman of distinction could speak Greek as well as he did Latin.
The greatest philosophical poem of the ancient world, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) owed a huge debt to Epicurus.
Polybius wanted to write an entirely new kind of history, one with a universal theme—the role of the unexpected or Fortune in the making of human events. He meant to turn history into a science based on clear rational principles backed up by observation. Inevitably, he turned to both Aristotle and Plato for help. It was a intellectual breakthrough—and a model for all historians in the future.
Republic, where in Books VIII and IX Plato gives us his most trenchant analysis of politics as it actually works, as opposed to the utopian ideal he outlined earlier in the work.
“For this state, [which] takes its foundation and growth from natural causes, will pass through a natural evolution to its decay.” Sooner or later, doom would come to the greatest empire in the world.
Cicero’s De Oratore (On the Orator) is the essential companion piece to his De Re Publica.
Tacitus is the first romantic anthropologist. His sentiments will reappear in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the “noble savage,” among other places. But its roots are to be found once again in Plato and his Myth of Atlantis: the idea that at some primeval stage of humanity, long before the cycle of man’s degeneration began, men knew the truth clear and pure and obeyed the laws of God.
Under the dual impress of Plato and Polybius, all Greek philosophy managed to do was convince generations of Romans that the happiness of the human spirit depended on being indifferent to everything that their reality offered.
Seneca’s solution to life’s inevitable cruelties was to withdraw. It was an increasingly attractive reaction in the later imperial age. The wise man must shun unnecessary human contact and connections, Seneca said. He must live within, and for, himself. He must cultivate the virtue of apatheia, literally an indifference to the fate of others—apathy even, in the last moment, to his own fate (faced by unjust accusations by the emperor Nero, Seneca and his wife chose suicide).17
When the eighteenth-century poet William Blake spoke of seeing eternity in a grain of sand, he was speaking the language of Plotinus and Neoplatonism.
The Stoics had spoken of a brotherhood of man not very different from Paul’s vision of the brotherhood of Christians,
Origen brought the fusion of Christianity and Platonism to an entirely new level—one could say a more urgent level. More than any other thinker before him, Origen used a Platonized Christianity to address the pressing issues of his age. In doing so, he permanently shaped its character in ways that only one other Church Father, St. Augustine, would begin to match.
More than any other Church Father, Origen established the sermon as a principal focus of Christian service and the Bible as the central subject for discussion.
Beyond the actual words of God, and underneath the literal narrative of law, history, and even geography, Origen could discern timeless truths waiting to be pointed out and explained. This way of reading the Bible, called exegesis, would become standard during the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Middle Ages came to interpret just about everything morally, symbolically, or allegorically and sometimes all three.§36 It was a direct legacy from Origen. But it sprang ultimately from Plato’s insight that symbols and allegories can sometimes lead men to the highest truths more powerfully than
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Origen’s biographer Joseph Trigg