Plato

Plato’s Cave

Here is a very good animation of Plato's Parable of the Cave, from Book VII of The Republic.

Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden

An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site of Plato's Cave would be dismissed as either a prankster or a lunatic. There never was any such cave as is described in the magnificent Book VII of Plato's Republic. And there never were any such cave-dwellers or goings-on as the ones described in Plato's story. And yet this, the most famous allegory in the history of philosophy, gives us the truth about the human condition. It lays bare the human predicament in which shadow is taken for substance, and substance for shadow, the truth-teller for a deceiver, and the deceiver for a truth-teller.

The reader will have guessed where I am going with this. If the allegory of the Cave delivers the truth about the human predicament despite its falsity when taken as an historical narrative, the same could be true for the stories in the Bible. No reasonable person nowadays could take Genesis as reporting historical facts. To take but one example, at Genesis 3, 8 we read that Adam and Eve, after having tasted of the forbidden fruit, "heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden . . . ." Taken literally, this implies that God has feet. But if he has feet was he shod on that day or not? If shod, what was his shoe size? 10 1/2? Obviously, nothing can have feet without having feet of a determinate size! And given that the original parents heard God stomping around, then he had to be fairly large: if God were the size of a flea, he wouldn't have made any noise. If God were a physical being, why couldn't he be the size of a flea or a microbe? The answer to these absurdities is the double-barreled denial that God is a physical being and that Genesis is an historical account. I could give further examples. (And you hope I won't.)

This is why the deliverances of evolutionary biology do not refute the Fall. (I grant that said deliverances refute some doctrines of the Fall, those doctrines that posit an original pair of humans, without animal progenitors, from whom the whole human race is descended.) Indeed, it is quite stupid to think that the Fall can be refuted from biology. It would as stupid as to think that the truths about the human condition that are expressed in Plato's famous allegory can be negated or disconfirmed by the failure of archeologists to locate the site of Plato's Cave, or by any physical proof that a structure like that of Plato's Cave is nomologically impossible.

And yet wasn't that what Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist, was quoted as maintaining?

Earlier I quoted John Farrell quoting biologist Jerry Coyne:

I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness.

I suppose this shows that the wages of scientism are (topical) stupidity.

Addenda (10 September 2011)

1. I said that the Allegory of the Cave "gives us the truth about the human condition." Suppose you disagree. Suppose you think the story provides no insight into the human condition. My point goes through nonetheless. The point is that the truth or falsity of the story is unaffected by empirical discoveries and nondiscoveries. Anthropological and archeological investigations are simply irrelevant to the assessment of the claims being made in the allegory. That, I hope, is perfectly obvious.

2. There is another point that I thought of making but did not because it struck me as too obvious, namely, that the Allegory of the Cave is clearly an allegory, and is indeed explicitly presented as such in Chapter VII of the Republic (cf. 514a et passim), whereas the Genesis account is neither clearly an allegory, nor explicitly presented in the text as one. But that too is irrelevant to my main point. The point is that biological, anthropological, and geological investigations are simply irrelevant for the evaluation of what Genesis discloses or purports to disclose about the human condition. For example, at Gen 1, 26 we are told that God made man in his image and likeness. That means: Man is a spiritual being. (See my post Imago Dei) Obviously, that proposition can neither be established nor refuted by any empirical investigation. The sciences of matter cannot be expected to disclose any truths about spirit. And if, standing firm on the natural sciences, you deny that there is anything other than matter, then you fall into the easily-refuted mistake of scientism. Furthermore, Genesis is simply incoherent if taken as presenting facts about history or facts about cosmology and physical cosmogenesis. Not only is it incoherent; it is contradicted by what we know from the physical sciences. Clearly, in any conflict between the Bible and natural science, the Bible will lose.

The upshot is that the point I am making about Genesis cannot be refuted by adducing the obvious difference between a piece of writing that presents itself as an allegory and a piece of writing that does not. Plato's intention was to write an allegory. The authors of Genesis presumably did not have the intention of writing an allegory. But that is irrelevant to the question whether the stories can be taken as reporting historical and physical facts. It is obvious that Plato's story cannot be so taken. It is less obvious, but nonetheless true, that the Genesis story cannot be so taken. For if you take it as historical reportage, then it is mostly false or incoherent, and you miss what is important: the spiritual, not the physical, meaning.

3. The mistake of those who think that biology refutes the Fall is the mirror-image of those benighted fundamentalists and literalists who think that the Fall 'stands or falls' with the historical accuracy of tales about original parents, trees, serpents, etc. The opposing groups are made for each other. The scientistic atheist biologist attacks a fundamentalist straw man while the benighted fundamentalist knocks himself out propping up his straw man. Go at it, boys! The spectacle is entertaining but not edifying.

Pseudo-Intellectual Tripe from William Sloane Coffin

William Sloane Coffin (Credo, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 5) thinks to correct Socrates and Descartes but makes a fool of himself in the process. Here is what he says:

     Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the
     uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was
     mistaken; "Cogito ergo sum" –"I think therefore I am"? Nonsense.
     "Amo ergo sum" — "I love therefore I am."

This is pseudo-intellectual tripe of the worst sort. It is an asinine form of cleverness in which one drops names without understanding the doctrines behind the names. It is the sort of thing that can impress only the half-educated, while eliciting scorn from those who drink deep from the Pierian spring.

Socrates' point is that self-examination is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. Coffin's point is that commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. These two points are obviously consistent: they can both be true. (And I should think they are both true.) But by saying that Socrates had it wrong, Coffin implies that his view entails the negation of Socrates' view — which is silly. Suppose A says that G. W. Bush was once governor of Texas, and B says, 'No you've got it wrong, he was once in the National Guard.' It is the same kind of silliness.

It should also be pointed out that even if commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived, it doesn't follow that it is a sufficient condition thereof. The committed but unexamined lives of a Nazi, Communist, or Islamo-totalitarian are not examples of lives well-lived.

As for Descartes, Coffin doesn't understand him at all. Else he would have realized that loving is a species of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of the term. Thinking in this sense covers all mental acts, including remembering, anticipating, perceiving, imagining, wishing, willing, loving, hoping, and thinking in the narrow sense of conceiving. All mental states having the property Brentano called intentionality (object directedness) fall under the cogito, the 'I think.' Thus Coffin commits an obvious ignoratio elenchi when he takes Descartes to be using cogito in the narrow sense that excludes amo.

Alexander Pope penned the following lines:

     A little learning is a dangerous thing
     Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring
     There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
     But drinking largely sobers us again.

I learned these lines in high school, and they have stood me in good stead ever since. 'Pierian' from Pieria, a region of ancient Macedonia where the Muses lived. Not to be confused with Peoria.

Both his greatness as a thinker and the probity of his quest for truth are revealed in the fact that Plato is not only the father of the Theory of Forms, but also the author of the most penetrating criticisms of them.

(By the way, the above aphorism is crafted in such a way as to demonstrate that the antecedent of a pronoun need not be its antecedent in the order of reading.)

A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians. What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification. Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2.)

Plato and Aristotle! These are not merely two systems: they are also types of two distinct human natures, which from time immemorial, under every sort of disguise, stand more or less inimically opposed. The whole medieval period in particular was riven by this conflict, which persists down to the present day, and which forms the most essential content of the history of the Christian Church. Although under other names, it is always of Plato and Aristotle that we speak. Visionary, mystical, Platonic natures disclose Christian ideas and their corresponding symbols from the fathomless depths of their souls. Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult. Finally, the Church eventually embraces both natures—one of them entrenched in the clergy, and the other in monasticism; but both keeping up a constant feud. ~ H. Heine, Deutschland

Plato, on the left carrying The Timaeus, points upwards while Aristotle, on the right carrying his Ethics, points either forward (thereby valorizing the 'horizontal' dimension of time and change as against Plato's 'vertical' gesture) or downwards (emphasizing the foundational status of sense particulars and sense knowledge.) At least five contrasts are suggested: vita contemplativa versus vita activa, mundus intelligibilis versus mundus sensibilis, transcendence versus immanence, eternity versus time, mystical unity versus rational-cum-empirical plurality.

Heine is right about the battle within Christianity between the Platonic and Aristotelian tendencies. Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Divine Simplicity — these are at bottom mystical notions impervious to penetration by the discursive intellect as we have been lately observing. Nevertheless,"Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult." But the dogmatic constructions, no matter how clever and detailed, never succeed in rendering intelligible the transintelligible, mystical contents.

A Platonist at Breakfast

I head out early one morning with wifey in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon just dripping with 1950s Americana. We belly up to the counter –where I can keep an eye on the waitresses — and order the $2. 98 special: two eggs any style, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. Meanwhile I punch the buttons of Floyd Cramer’s "Last Date" on the personal jukebox in front of me after feeding it with a quarter from wifey’s purse.

"How would you like your eggs, sir?"

The Perils of Pleasure

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. (Emphasis added.)

Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:

. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)

Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.

Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. His not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

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Wonder: Theaetetus 155 d with Aristotelian and Heideggerian Glosses

Plato puts the following words in the mouth of Socrates at Theaeteus 155 d (tr. Benjamin Jowett): "I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

Aristotle echoes the Theaetetus passage at 982b12 of his Metaphysics: "It was their wonder, astonishment, that first led men to philosophize and still leads them." Martin Heidegger, commenting on both passages, writes in Was ist das — die Philosophie?:

Das Erstaunen ist als pathos die arche der Philosophie. Das griechische Wort arche muessen wir im vollen Sinne verstehen. Es nennt dasjenige, von woher etwas ausgeht. Aber dieses "von woher" wird im Ausgehen nicht zurueckgelassen, vielmehr wird die arche zu dem, was das Verbum archein sagt, zu solchem, was herrscht. Das pathos des Erstaunens steht nicht einfach so am Beginn der Philosophie wie z. B. der Operation des Chirurgen das Waschen der Haende voraufgeht. Das Erstaunen traegt und durchherrscht die Philosophie.

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Simone Weil in the Light of Plato, Phaedo 83

To understand Simone Weil, you must understand her beloved master, Plato. So let's interpret a passage from the Phaedo, and then compare it to some statements of Weil.

At St. 83 we read, "…the perceptions of the eye, and the ear, and the the senses are full of deceit." The point is presumably not that the senses are sometimes nonveridical, but that they tie us to a world that is not ultimately real, and that distracts us from the one that is. The point is not epistemological but axiological and ontological. It is not that the senses are unreliable, whether episodically or globally, in respect of the information they provide us about an external world of spatiotemporal particulars. They are reliable enough in providing us such information. The point is rather that the senses deceive us into conferring high value on what is of low value, and into taking as ultimately real what is derivatively real.

It would be a mistake, therefore, to read the passage as an anticipation of the modern problematic of the external world. The point is much deeper. The Platonic inquiry call into question, not human knowledge of a physical world taken to be ultimately real, but the reality and importance of the physical world itself.

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The Meno Paradox and the Difference Between Paradoxes and Arguments

S. C. e-mails:

I stumbled onto a question in my studies today that I am not sure how to resolve and you seem like just the person to ask. The question is this: what, exactly, makes a paradox different from a regular old argument? Consider: we tend to call paradoxes those arguments which seem sound and yet whose conclusions we are not inclined to accept. Hence, what one of my professors calls Meno’s Paradox is not a paradox in Meno’s eyes. For him it’s simply an argument that shows we can’t come to know things. I think the same can be said for Zeno’s paradoxes. Zeno was not trying to conclude with contradictions for us to be puzzled over—he was trying to give reductio ad absurdum arguments against motion and time. If Zeno was right about time and motion then none of his arguments are paradoxes any more than the problem of evil is a paradox for the atheist. It seems to me that the only thing that makes a paradox a paradox is that the consumer is unwilling to accept its conclusion (or has independent reason to think the conclusion must be wrong). Am I missing something here?

What is the difference between a paradox and an argument? An excellent question the answer to which depends on how 'paradox' and 'argument' are defined. Following Nicholas Rescher, I would define a paradox as a set of individually plausible but collectively inconsistent propositions. Meno's paradox, also known as the paradox of inquiry, is an example. It can be cast in the form of the following aporetic tetrad:

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Can Existence Be Analyzed in Terms of Power? Commentary on Sophist 247e

At Sophist 247e, Plato puts the following into the mouth of the Eleatic Stranger:

I suggest that anything has real being that is so constituted as to possess any sort of power either to affect anything else or to be affected, in however small a degree, by the most insignificant agent, though it be only once. I am proposing as a mark to distinguish real things that they are nothing but power. (Cornford tr.)

The gist of the passage is that what makes a thing real or existent is its (active) power to affect other things or its (passive) power to be affected by them. In sum,

D. For any x, x exists =_df x is causally active or passive.

Thus everything causally active/passive exists, and only the causally active/passive exists. The definition rules out of existence all 'causally inert' items such as propositions as Frege construes them, namely, as the senses of context-free indicative sentences. And of course it rules out sets of Fregean propositions. But what about the mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) set of the books on my desks? Each of the books is existent or real by (D) and so is the object resulting from the bundling of the books together; but the set of these books is arguably abstract and thus causally inert. So if (D) is true, we cannot admit mathematical sets into our ontology. For such items do not enter into causal relations. Fregean propositions and mathematical sets are therefore putative counterexamples to (D). If these counterexamples are genuine then (D) fails extensionally: the extension of the existent is wider than the extension of the causally active/passive.

But what interests me at the moment is not the extensional correctness of (D) but a deeper question. Even if we assume that (D) is extensionally correct, i.e., that all and only existents are causally active/passive, does (D) tell us what it is for an item to exist? When we say of a thing that it exists, what are we saying about it? That it is causally active/passive? My answer is in the negative — even if we assume that all and only existents are causally active/passive.

My reason is quite simple. For an item to be capable of acting or being acted upon it must 'be there' or exist! 'Before' it can be a doer or a done-to it must exist. (The 'before' is to be taken logically not temporally.) The nonexistent cannot act or be acted upon. There is no danger that winged horses will collide with airplanes. The reason is not that winged horses are abstract or causally inert objects; the reason is that they do not exist. Winged horses, if there were any, would belong to the category of the causally active/passive. But they don't exist — which is the reason why they cannot act or be acted upon. They are not abstract items but nonexistent concrete items. Existence, therefore, is a necessary condition of an item's being a causal agent or patient. It follows that existence cannot be explicated in terms of power as per the Eleatic Stranger's suggestion. Existence is too fundamental to be explicated in terms of power — or anything else.

If you are having trouble seeing the point consider the winged horse Pegasus and his singleton {Pegasus}. Both of these items are nonexistent. One is concrete (causally active/passive) while the other is abstract. But neither can enter into causal relations. To say that Pegasus is concrete is to say that Pegasus, were he to exist, would belong among the causally active/passive. What prevents him from being such is his nonexistence. His existence, therefore, cannot be explicated in terms of causal activity/passivity.

There is a tendency to conflate two different questions about existence. One question about existence concerns what exists. Answers to this question can be supplied in the form of definitions like (D) above. But there is a deeper question about existence, namely, the question as what it is for an existing thing to exist. What I have just argued is that this second question cannot be answered with any definition like (D). For even if you find a definition that is extensionally correct and immune to counterexamples, you will at the very most have specified the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing's being among existing things. You will have not thereby have put your finger on what it is for an existing item to exist.

Suppose you say that, for any x, x exists =_df x has properties. This proposal has an excellent chance of being extensionally correct: necessarily, everything that exists has properties, and everything that has properties exists. But the proposal does not get at the existence of an existing thing precisely because it presupposes the existence of existing things. This is because all such definitions are really circular inasmuch as they have the form:

For any x, x exists =_df x is ____ and x exists.

Existence itself eludes definitional grasp. Even if the existent can be defined, the Existence of the existent cannot be defined. For more on this fascinating topic, see my A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002), pp. 2-8.

Approaching Plato: A Guide to the Early and Middle Dialogues

This just over the transom from Mark Anderson, Department of Philosophy. Belmont University:

I have enjoyed your site, which I recently discovered. I, too, am something of a recovering academician, but I am still in the academy. I am trying to develop a means of teaching philosophy while still practicing philosophy, to be a professor of philosophy without ceasing to profess philosophy.

I am writing because I think you will be interested in a book my colleague and I wrote and recently put online. You can find it here.

Approaching Plato: A Guide to the Early and Middle Dialogues

We decided to put the book on line after a) the few publishers we sent it to could not understand that the work is appropriate for all levels of reader (a book addressed to everyone from Intro students to Professors who read Greek does not fit into their categories), and b) we realized that if it were online it might actually help more people, even if it doesn’t puff up our CVs.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks, Mark. I have posted your letter in the hope that it will bring some readers to your site, and in case anyone wants to comment on the problem of publishing philosophy for a wide audience. It may be that we philosophers face a dilemma when we publish hard copy (as opposed to 'publishing' online): Either one publishes high-quality material or one panders to the masses with jokes and gimmicks and simplifications. If the former, then one is confined to the journals and academic presses with consequent low readership. If the latter, one sells books but loses self-respect. It can of course be argued that this is a false dilemma. But I wonder: Would Bertrand Russell's popular book The Conquest of Happiness be accepted for publication by a major nonacademic press today if it were submitted by an unknown author? In our trash culture only trash can turn a buck. If I am exaggerating, by how much? And if I am exaggerating am I not exaggerating 'in the right direction'?