by Ulf Wolf
“I agree,” he answered. “As far as I am able to understand you.”
“Moreover,” said Socrates. “You must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are never hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.”
“Yes, very natural.”
“And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?”
“Anything but surprising,” replied his student.
No wonder the powers that be assumed their world would be safer with one less Socrates in it.
Plato
Plato, who, our records show, lived from around 428 to 347 BCE, was a more systematic thinker than Socrates, but his writings, particularly the earlier dialogues, are usually seen as a continuation and elaboration of Socratic insights.
Like Socrates, Plato regarded ethics as the highest branch of knowledge and stressed the intellectual basis of virtue, identifying virtue with wisdom—virtually a Buddhist concept—leading to the so-called Socratic paradox that, as Socrates (according to Plato) asserts in the Protagoras, “No wise man does evil voluntarily.”
The foundation of Plato’s philosophy is the theory of Ideas, sometimes referred to as the doctrine of Forms. The theory of Ideas, as expressed in many of his dialogues—particularly the Republic and the Parmenides—divides existence into two realms: an “intelligible realm” of perfect, eternal, and invisible Ideas, or Forms, and a “sensible realm” of concrete, familiar objects.
Trees, stones, human bodies, and other objects that are perceived and known through the senses are for Plato unreal, shadowy, and imperfect copies of the Ideas of tree, stone, and the human body, which can only be seen by the inner eye.
He arrived at this conclusion through his high standard of knowledge, a standard that attains to all genuine objects of knowledge be described without contradiction.
Because all objects perceived by the senses undergo change, an assertion made about such objects at one time will not be true a second later, if for no other reason than that it is now in a different moment.
According to Plato, sensible realm objects are therefore not entirely real and any beliefs derived from experience of such objects are vague and unreliable; whereas the principles of mathematics and philosophy, discovered by inner meditation on the Ideas or Forms, constitute the only knowledge worthy of the name.
This view is represented by the Socratic cave (see above), where humanity is shown as imprisoned in a cave with a fire burning between them and the opening of this cave, and mistaking shadows on the wall for reality. Plato saw the philosopher as the person who penetrates to the world outside the cave of ignorance and, who by entering the world of sunlight achieves a vision of the true reality, the realm of Ideas.
Plato’s concept of the Absolute Idea of the Good, which is the highest Form and includes all others, has been a main source of pantheistic and mystical religious doctrines in Western culture.
Plato’s theory of Ideas and knowledge formed the foundation for his ethical and social idealism according to which the realm of eternal Ideas provides the standards or ideals according to which all objects and actions should be judged. The philosopher—rising above sensual pleasures, and so refrains from them, instead searching for knowledge of abstract principles—finds in these ideals the basis for personal behavior and social institutions.
According to Plato, personal virtue springs from a harmonious relation among the three parts of the soul: reason, emotion, and desire. Social justice likewise is made up of harmony among the classes of society. The ideal state of a sound mind in a sound body requires that the intellect control the desires and passions, as the ideal state of society requires that the wisest individuals rule the pleasure-seeking masses.
Truth, beauty, and justice all meet in the Idea of the Good; therefore, art that expresses moral values is the best art.
As a result, Plato did support censorship of art forms that he believed corrupted the young and promoted social injustice; perhaps not a bad idea if you consider what passes for art these days.
Aristotle
Aristotle, who in 367 BCE began his studies at Plato’s Academy at age 17, was Plato’s most illustrious pupil and also ranks with his teacher among the most profound and influential thinkers of the Western world.
After studying for many years at Plato’s Academy, Aristotle went on to become the tutor of Alexander the Great. That task done, he then returned to Athens to founded the Lyceum, a school that, like Plato’s Academy, for centuries remained one of the great centers of learning in Greece, if not in the world.
In his lectures at the Lyceum, Aristotle defined the basic concepts and principles of many of the sciences, such as logic, biology, physics, and psychology, and in delineating and founding the science of logic, he developed the theory of deductive inference—the process of drawing conclusions from accepted premises by means of logical reasoning. His theory is exemplified by the syllogism—a deductive argument having two premises and a conclusion.
But Aristotle was not above disagreeing with his illustrious teacher, and in his metaphysical theory, Aristotle took more than one shot at Plato’s theory of Forms. Aristotle argued that there was no such thing as matter-less forms; that such forms could not exist by themselves but could only exist in particular things—things which always are composed of both form and matter.
He understood substances as matter organized by a particular form. Humans, he pointed out as an example, are composed of flesh and blood arranged to shape arms, legs, and the other parts of the body. In other words, he held that there is not ideal human Form without the actual human to represent it.
Nature, for Aristotle, is an organic system of many things whose forms, be they simple or complex, make it possible to arrange them into classes comprising species and genera. He held that each species has a form, a purpose, and a mode of development by which it can be defined.
The aim of science, he went on to profess, is to define the essential forms, purposes, and modes of development of all species and to arrange them in their natural order in accordance with their complexities of form, the main levels of which, in his view, were the inanimate (such as rocks and water), the vegetative, the animal, and the rational (i.e., man—who he saw as the highest order of nature on Earth).
While Aristotle defines the soul as the form of the body—in truth, for him the soul or spirit does not really exist. While bot Socrates and Plato held concepts that we might call other-worldly, Aristotle was firmly anchored in Terra Firma: if you couldn’t touch it, or measure it, it simply did not exist, Socrates and Plato notwithstanding.
Speaking of other-worldly, Aristotle held that the heavenly bodies—which he saw as composed of an imperishable substance (ether) and as moved eternally in perfect circular motion by God—were a higher order of nature than humans.
This hierarchical classification of nature was later adopted by many Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theologians of the Middle Ages as a view of nature consistent with their religious beliefs.
Aristotle’s political and ethical philosophy also grew out of a critical examination of Plato’s principles (where would Aristotle have been without a Plato to negate?). The standards of personal and social behavior, according to Aristotle, can only be derived from a scientific study of the natural tendencies of individuals and societies, and can never be found in a heavenly or abstract realm of pure forms—again displaying his non-comprehension of Socrates’ and Plato’s knowledge of the soul.
As a result, Aristotle was less
insistent than Socrates or Plato on a rigorous conformity to absolute principles. In fact, Aristotle regarded ethical rules only as practical guides to a happy and well-rounded life.
It might well have been that Aristotle developed his principles with one ear to the Platonic ground and the other to the popular views of the time, especially since his emphasis on happiness—as the active fulfillment of natural capacities—expressed the attitude toward life held by cultivated Greeks of his time.
In political theory, Aristotle finally agreed with Plato that a monarchy ruled by a wise king would be the ideal political structure, but he also held that societies differ in their needs and traditions and so maintained that a limited democracy is usually the best compromise.
When it came to knowledge, Aristotle again rejected the Platonic notion that knowledge is innate and instead insisted that knowledge can only be acquired by generalization from experience.
Finally, he saw art as a means of pleasure and intellectual enlightenment rather than an instrument of moral education.
As I said, where would Aristotle have been without a Plato to negate?
Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy
From the 4th century BCE—which is about when the classical Greeks bowed out—to the rise of Christian philosophy in the 4th century CE, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism were the main philosophical schools in the Western world.
Interest in natural science declined steadily over these eight centuries, and these schools concerned themselves primarily ethics and religion.
These centuries were also a period of intense intercultural contact, and many Western philosophers were influenced by ideas brought back from, or encountered by traveling to, India (Buddhism), Persia (Zoroastrianism), and Palestine (Judaism).
Epicureanism
In the year 306 BCE, Epicurus founded a philosophical school in the garden of his Athens home—which is why his followers became known as philosophers of the garden.
His philosophy adopted the atomistic physics of Democritus, but he also allowed for an element of chance in the physical world by postulating that atoms sometimes swerve in unpredictable ways, and so actually foretelling quantum physics.
Epicurus’s philosophy aimed to promote human happiness by removing the fear of death. He further held that natural science only has value if it can be used to make practical decisions that help humans achieve the maximum amount of pleasure—which he then went on to define as “gentle motion and the absence of pain.”
We know of Epicurus’ teachings primarily through Lucretius’ philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) written in the 1st CE. One could say that Lucretius singlehandedly resurrected Epicurus, and then popularized him in Rome.
Stoicism
The Stoic school, which was founded in Athens around 310 BCE by Zeno of Citium, grew out of the earlier Cynics movement, which rejected social institutions and material (worldly) values.
Stoicism grew to become the most influential school of the Greco-Roman world and produced such remarkable writers and personalities as the Greek slave and philosopher Epictetus in the 1st century CE and the 2nd-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was famous for his wisdom and nobility of character.
Stoicism holds that one can achieve freedom and tranquility only by rising above and becoming insensitive to material comforts and external fortune, and by so dedicating oneself to a life of virtue and wisdom.
The Stoics followed Heraclitus in holding the primary substance to be fire and in worshiping the Logos, which they identified with the energy, law, reason, and divine guidance found throughout nature.
The Stoics also argued that nature was a system designed by divine beings and they taught that humans should therefore strive to live in accordance with nature.
The Stoic doctrine that each person is part of God and that all people form a universal family was instrumental in breaking down national, social, and racial barriers and so prepared the way for the spread of Christianity.
The Stoic doctrine of natural law, which holds that human nature should be the standard for evaluating laws and social institutions, greatly influenced first Roman, and later Western law.
Skepticism
The school of Skepticism, which carried on the Sophists’ criticisms of objective knowledge, came to dominate Plato’s Academy in the 3rd century BCE. The Skeptics had discovered, as had Zeno of Elea, logic to be a powerful critical device, one capable of destroying any positive philosophical view if used skillfully. And make no mistake, the Stoics were skilled at it.
Their fundamental assumption, postulate really, was that humans cannot attain knowledge or wisdom concerning reality—nothing, in other words, can really be known.
Based on this the Skeptics concluded that the way to happiness lies in a complete suspension of judgment, holding that suspending judgment about the things of which one has no true knowledge (and one can have no true knowledge about anything) creates tranquility and fulfillment.
An extreme example of this attitude is the legend that Pyrrho, one of the most noted of the Skeptics, once refused to direct his horse to veer as his carriage approached the edge of a cliff. The carriage had to be diverted by his students, or he would have perished.
Now, I believe that there is a good word for that point of view: apathy.
Philo
In the 1st century CE, Philo of Alexandria combined Greek philosophy— particularly Platonic and Pythagorean ideas—with Judaism in a system that not only anticipated Neoplatonism, but also Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mysticism.
Philo held that the true nature of God so far transcended human understanding and experience as to be incomprehensible as well as indescribable to man. Still, in violation of his own assumptions, he tried both to comprehend and describe, and so outlined the natural world as a series of stages of descent from God at the pinnacle and the source of all things good, terminating in matter as the source of evil.
However, he did not seem to have lost much sleep over the contradiction that matter ultimately sprung from God, and could therefore not be the source of all evil.
Politically, Philo advocated a religious state, not unlike those we see today in certain Muslim countries.
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism, which at its peak constituted a true threat to the rise of Christianity, was founded in the 3rd century CE by Ammonius Saccus and his more famous disciple Plotinus.
Plotinus based his ideas on the mystical and poetic writings of Plato, of the Pythagoras, and of Philo. For Plotinus, the main function of philosophy was to prepare individuals for the (mystic) experience of ecstasy, in which they become one with God.
He agreed with Philo that the nature of God—or the One, as Plotinus called Him—lay beyond rational understanding, but he disagreed with Philo as to whether or not humans could experience Him.
The One, the source of all reality, held Plotinus, could indeed be experienced—for, after all, was this not God experiencing Himself?
Plotinus saw a universe emanating from the One through a mysterious process of divine energy cascading down successive levels.
The highest of these level formed a trinity constituting firstly the One; then the Logos, which contained the Platonic Forms; and lastly the World Soul, which in turn gave rise to human souls and natural forces.
The farther down this cascading creation you looked, the more imperfect and evil those creations, all the way down to pure matter.
For Plotinus, the highest goal of life was to purify oneself of dependence on bodily comforts and, through philosophical meditation, to prepare oneself for an ecstatic reunion with the One (a goal he indeed shared with not only the Hindu Yogi, but also many Buddhists, and later on, the Christian Mystics).
Medieval Philosophy
By the 3rd century CE, Christianity had spread to the more educated classes of the Roman Empire and the powerful fathers of the new church set about to combine the teachings of the Gospels with the p
hilosophical concepts of the Greek and Roman schools.
Thus, as the Greco-Roman civilization began its long decline, so did Western philosophy, as its practitioners more and more turned their attention from scientific investigation of nature in search of worldly happiness to the fresh Christian problem of salvation in another and better world.
Of particular importance in this evolution were the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and the Council of Ephesus in 431, which both drew upon the metaphysical ideas of Aristotle and Plotinus to establish important (though very man-made) Christian doctrines about the divinity of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity.
Augustinian Philosophy
The process of reconciling the Greek accent on reason with the religious fervor found in the teachings of Christ and the apostles found a very eloquent expression in the writings of Saint Augustine during the late 4th and early 5th centuries.
In the end, Saint Augustine had succeeded in formulating a new system of thought that, through subsequent amendments and elaborations (again, all human-made and mostly artificial), eventually became the authoritative doctrine of the ever more firmly established new Christian religion.
By the musings of Saint Augustine, Christian thought then remained quite Platonic in spirit up until the 13th century, when Aristotelian philosophy grew dominant.
Augustine had argued that religious faith and philosophical understanding are complementary rather than opposed and that one must “believe in order to understand and understand in order to believe.”
And, like the Neoplatonists, he had considered the soul a higher form of existence than the body and taught that true knowledge can only be gained in the contemplation of Platonic ideas as abstract notions apart from sensory experience and anything physical or material.