Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  Plato’s use of the word “idea” (which in Greek denoted the form, pattern, essential quality, or nature of something) clearly differs from our contemporary usage. In the usual modern understanding, ideas are subjective mental constructs private to the individual mind. By contrast, Plato meant something that exists not only in human consciousness but outside of it as well. Platonic Ideas are objective. They do not depend on human thought, but exist entirely in their own right. They are perfect patterns embedded in the very nature of things. The Platonic Idea is, as it were, not merely a human idea but the universe’s idea, an ideal entity that can express itself externally in concrete tangible form or internally as a concept in the human mind. It is a primordial image or formal essence that can manifest in various ways and on various levels, and is the foundation of reality itself.

  The Ideas are thus the fundamental elements of both an ontology (a theory of being) and an epistemology (a theory of knowledge): they constitute the basic essence and deepest reality of things, and also the means by which certain human knowledge is possible. A bird is a bird by virtue of its participation in the archetypal Idea of the Bird. And the human mind can know a bird by virtue of the mind’s own participation in that same Idea of the Bird. The red color of an object is red because it participates in archetypal redness, and human perception registers red by virtue of the mind’s participation in the same Idea. The human mind and the universe are ordered according to the same archetypal structures or essences, because of which, and only because of which, true understanding of things is possible for the human intelligence.

  The paradigmatic example of Ideas for Plato was mathematics. Following the Pythagoreans, with whose philosophy he seems to have been especially intimate, Plato understood the physical universe to be organized in accordance with the mathematical Ideas of number and geometry. These Ideas are invisible, apprehensible by intelligence only, and yet can be discovered to be the formative causes and regulators of all empirically visible objects and processes. But again, the Platonic and Pythagorean conception of mathematical ordering principles in nature was essentially different from the conventional modern view. In Plato’s understanding, circles, triangles, and numbers are not merely formal or quantitative structures imposed by the human mind on natural phenomena, nor are they only mechanically present in phenomena as a brute fact of their concrete being. Rather, they are numinous and transcendent entities, existing independently of both the phenomena they order and the human mind that perceives them. While the concrete phenomena are transient and imperfect, the mathematical Ideas ordering those phenomena are perfect, eternal, and changeless. Hence the basic Platonic belief—that there exists a deeper, timeless order of absolutes behind the surface confusion and randomness of the temporal world—found in mathematics, it was thought, a particularly graphic demonstration. The training of the mind in mathematics was therefore deemed by Plato essential to the philosophical enterprise, and according to tradition, above the door to his Academy were placed the words “Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here.”

  The position described thus far represents a fair approximation of Plato’s most characteristic views concerning the Ideas, including those set forth in his most celebrated dialogues—the Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and the Timaeus—as well as in the Seventh Letter, his one probably genuine extant letter. Yet a number of ambiguities and discrepancies remained unresolved in the corpus of Plato’s work. At times Plato seems to exalt the ideal over the empirical to such an extent that all concrete particulars are understood to be, as it were, only a series of footnotes to the transcendent Idea. At other times he seems to stress the intrinsic nobility of created things, precisely because they are embodied expressions of the divine and eternal. The exact degree to which the Ideas are transcendent rather than immanent—whether they are entirely separate from sensible things, with the latter only imperfect imitations, or whether they are in some manner present in sensible things, with the latter essentially sharing in the Ideas’ nature—cannot be determined from the many references in the different dialogues. Generally speaking, it seems that as Plato’s thought matured, he moved toward a more transcendent interpretation. Yet in the Parmenides, probably written after most of the dialogues cited above, Plato presented several formidable arguments against his own theory, pointing out questions concerning the nature of the Ideas—how many kinds are there, what are their relations to each other and to the sensible world, what is the precise meaning of “participation,” how is knowledge of them possible—the responses to which raised seemingly unsolvable problems and inconsistencies. Some of these questions, which Plato posed perhaps as much out of dialectical vigor as from self-criticism, became the basis for later philosophers’ objections to the theory of Ideas.

  Similarly, in the Theaetetus, Plato analyzed the nature of knowledge with extraordinary acuity and with no firm conclusions, never adducing the theory of Ideas as a way out of the epistemological impasse he depicted. In the Sophist, Plato ascribed reality not just to the Ideas but also to change, life, soul, and understanding. Elsewhere he pointed to the existence of an intermediate class of mathematical objects between Ideas and sensible particulars. On several occasions he posited a hierarchy of Ideas, yet different dialogues suggested different hierarchies, with the Good, the One, Existence, Truth, or Beauty variously occupying supreme positions, sometimes simultaneously and overlapping. Clearly Plato never constructed a complete, fully coherent system of Ideas. Yet it is also evident that, despite his own unresolved questions concerning his central doctrine, Plato considered the theory true, and that without it human knowledge and moral activity could have no foundation. And it was this conviction that formed the basis for the Platonic tradition.

  To sum up: From the Platonic perspective, the fundamentals of existence are the archetypal Ideas, which constitute the intangible substrate of all that is tangible. The true structure of the world is revealed not by the senses, but by the intellect, which in its highest state has direct access to the Ideas governing reality. All knowledge presupposes the existence of the Ideas. The archetypal realm, far from being an unreal abstraction or imaginary metaphor for the concrete world, is here considered to be the very basis of reality, that which determines its order and renders it knowable. To this end, Plato declared direct experience of the transcendent Ideas to be the philosopher’s primary goal and ultimate destination.

  Ideas and Gods

  All things are indeed “full of gods,” Plato asserted in his final work, the Laws. And here we must address a peculiar ambiguity in the nature of archetypes—an ambiguity central to the Greek vision as a whole—that suggested the existence of an underlying connection between ruling principles and mythic beings. Although at times Plato favored a more abstract formulation of archetypes, as with the mathematical Ideas, at other times he spoke in terms of divine figures, mythical personages of exalted stature. On many occasions, Socrates’s way of speaking in the Platonic dialogues has a distinctly Homeric tone, treating various philosophical and historical matters in the form of mythological figures and narratives.

  A taut irony, a playful seriousness, colors Plato’s use of myth, so that one cannot pin down precisely the level on which he wishes to be understood. He often prefaced his mythical excursions with the ambiguous ploy, at once affirming and self-distancing, of declaring that it was “a likely account” or that “either this or something very like it is true.” Depending on a specific dialogue’s context, Zeus, Apollo, Hera, Ares, Aphrodite, and the rest could signify actual deities, allegorical figures, character types, psychological attitudes, modes of experience, philosophic principles, transcendent essences, sources of poetic inspiration or divine communications, objects of conventional piety, unknowable entities, imperishable artifacts of the supreme creator, heavenly bodies, foundations of the universal order, or rulers and teachers of mankind. More than only literalistic metaphors, Plato’s gods defy strict definition, in one dialogue serving as fanciful
characters in a didactic fable, in another commanding an undoubted ontological reality. Not infrequently, these personified archetypes are used in his most philosophically earnest moments, as if the depersonalized language of metaphysical abstraction were no longer suitable when directly confronting the numinous essence of things.

  We see this memorably illustrated in the Symposium, where Eros is discussed as the preeminent force in human motivations. In a fine succession of elegantly dialectical speeches, the several participants in Plato’s philosophical drinking party describe Eros as a complex and multidimensional archetype which at the physical level expresses itself in the sexual instinct, but at higher levels impels the philosopher’s passion for intellectual beauty and wisdom, and culminates in the mystical vision of the eternal, the ultimate source of all beauty. Yet throughout the dialogue that principle is represented in personified and mythical terms, with Eros considered a deity, the god of love, with the principle of Beauty referred to as Aphrodite, and with numerous allusions to other mythic figures such as Dionysus, Kronos, Orpheus, and Apollo. Similarly, in the Timaeus, when Plato sets forth his views on the creation and structure of the universe, he does so in almost entirely mythological terms; so too in his many discussions of the nature and destiny of the soul (Phaedo, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Republic, Laws). Specific qualities of character are regularly attributed to specific deities, as in the Phaedrus, where the philosopher who seeks after wisdom is called a follower of Zeus, while the warrior who would shed blood for his cause is said to be attendant upon Ares. Often there is little doubt that Plato is employing myth as pure allegory, as when in the Protagoras he has the Sophist teacher use the ancient myth of Prometheus simply to make an anthropological point. In his theft of fire from the heavens, giving it to mankind with the other arts of civilization, Prometheus symbolized rational man’s emergence from a more primitive state. At other times, however, Plato himself seems swept up into the mythic dimension, as when, in the Philebus, he has Socrates describe his dialectical method of analyzing the world of Ideas as “a gift of heaven, which, as I conceive, the gods tossed among men by the hands of a new Prometheus, and therewith a blaze of light.”

  By philosophizing in such a manner, Plato gave expression to a unique confluence of the emerging rationalism of Hellenic philosophy with the prolific mythological imagination of the ancient Greek psyche—that primordial religious vision, with both Indo-European and Levantine roots extending back through the second millennium B.C. to Neolithic times, which provided the Olympian polytheistic foundation for the cult, art, poetry, and drama of classical Greek culture. Among ancient mythologies, that of Greece was singularly complex, richly elaborated, and systematic. As such, it provided a fertile basis for the evolution of Greek philosophy itself, which bore distinct traces of its mythic ancestry not only in its initial emergence but in its Platonic apogee. Yet it was not just the language of myth in Plato’s dialogues, but rather the underlying functional equivalence of deities and Ideas implicit in much of his thought, that made Plato so pivotal in the development of the Greek mind. As the classicist John Finley has noted, “Just as the Greek gods, variable though they may have been in cult, corporately comprise an analysis of the world—Athena as mind, Apollo as random and unpredictable illumination, Aphrodite as sexuality, Dionysus as change and excitement, Artemis as untouchedness, Hera as settlement and marriage, Zeus as order dominant over all—so the Platonic forms exist in their own right, lucent and eternal above any transitory human participation in them.… [Like the forms, the gods] were essences of life, by contemplation of which any individual life took on meaning and substance.”1

  Plato often criticized poets for anthropomorphizing the gods, yet he did not cease from teaching his own philosophical system in striking mythological formulations and with implicitly religious intent. Despite the high value he placed on intellectual rigor, and despite his dogmatic strictures concerning poetry and art in his political doctrines, the distinct implication in many passages of the dialogues is that the imaginative faculty, both poetic and religious, was as useful in the quest for attaining knowledge of the world’s essential nature as any purely logical, let alone empirical, approach. But of especial importance for our present inquiry was the effect of Plato’s vision on the unstable and problematic condition of the Greek world view. For by speaking of Ideas on one page and gods on another in such analogous terms, Plato resolved, tenuously yet with weighty and enduring consequences, the central tension in the classical Greek mind between myth and reason.

  The Evolution of the Greek Mind from Homer to Plato

  The Mythic Vision

  The religious and mythological background of Greek thought was profoundly pluralistic in character. When successive waves of Greek-speaking Indo-European nomadic warriors began sweeping into the lands of the Aegean around the turn of the second millennium B.C., they brought with them their heroic patriarchal mythology, presided over by the great sky-god Zeus. Although the ancient matriarchal mythologies of the indigenous pre-Hellenic societies, including the highly developed Minoan goddess-worshiping civilization on Crete, were eventually subordinated to the religion of the conquerors, they were not entirely suppressed. For the northern male deities mated with and married the ancient southern goddesses, as Zeus did Hera, and this complex amalgamation which came to constitute the Olympian pantheon did much to ensure the dynamism and vitality of classical Greek myth. Moreover, this pluralism in the Hellenic inheritance was further expressed in the continuing dichotomy between, on the one hand, Greek public religion, with its polis festivals and civic rituals focused on the major Olympian deities, and, on the other, the widely popular mystery religions—Orphic, Dionysian, Eleusinian—whose esoteric rites drew on pre-Greek and Oriental religious traditions: death-rebirth initiations, agricultural fertility cults, and worship of the Great Mother Goddess.

  Given the oath-bound secrecy of the mystery religions, it is difficult from the present vantage point to judge the relative significance of the various forms of Hellenic religious belief for individual Greeks. What is evident, however, is the pervasive archetypal resonance of the archaic Greek vision, expressed above all in the foundational epic poems of Greek culture that have come down to us, the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. Here, at the luminous dawn of the Western literary tradition, was captured the primordial mythological sensibility in which the events of human existence were perceived as intimately related to and informed by the eternal realm of gods and goddesses. The archaic Greek vision reflected an intrinsic unity of immediate sense perception and timeless meaning, of particular circumstance and universal drama, of human activity and divine motivation. Historical persons lived out a mythic heroism in war and wandering, while Olympian deities watched and intervened over the plain of Troy. The play of the senses on an outflung world bright with color and drama was never separated from a comprehension of the world’s meaning that was both ordered and mythic. Keen apprehension of the physical world—of seas and mountains and dawns, of banquets and battles, of bows, helmets, and chariots—was permeated with the felt presence of the gods in nature and human destiny. The immediacy and freshness of the Homeric vision was paradoxically tied to a virtually conceptual understanding of the world governed by an ancient and venerable mythology.

  Even the towering figure of Homer himself suggested a peculiarly indivisible synthesis of the individual and the universal. The monumental epic poems were brought forth from a greater collective psyche, creations of the Hellenic racial imagination passed on, developed, and refined generation after generation, bard after bard. Yet within the established formulaic patterns of oral tradition that governed the epics’ composition there also lived an unmistakably personal particularity, a flexible individualism and spontaneity of style and vision. Thus “Homer” was ambiguously both an individual human poet and a collective personification of the entire ancient Greek memory.

  The values expressed in the Homeric epics, composed around the eighth century B.C., continued to inspir
e successive generations of Greeks throughout antiquity, and the many figures of the Olympian pantheon, systematically delineated somewhat later in Hesiod’s Theogony, informed and pervaded the Greek cultural vision. In the various divinities and their powers lay a sense of the universe as an ordered whole, a cosmos rather than a chaos. The natural world and the human world were not distinguishable domains in the archaic Greek universe, for a single fundamental order structured both nature and society, and embodied the divine justice that empowered Zeus, the ruler of the gods. Although the universal order was especially represented in Zeus, even he was ultimately bound by an impersonal fate (moira) that governed all and that maintained a certain equilibrium of forces. The gods were indeed often capricious in their actions, with human destinies in the balance. Yet the whole cohered, and the forces of order prevailed over those of chaos—just as the Olympians led by Zeus had defeated the Giants in the primeval struggle for rulership of the world, and just as Odysseus after his long and perilous wanderings at last triumphantly achieved home.2

  By the fifth century B.C., the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were employing the ancient myths to explore the deeper themes of the human condition. Courage, cunning and strength, nobility and the striving for immortal glory were the characteristic virtues of the epic heroes. Yet however great the individual, man’s lot was circumscribed by fate and the fact of his mortality. It was above all the superior man whose actions could draw the destructive wrath of the gods upon him, often because of his hubris, sometimes seemingly unjustly. Against the backdrop of that opposition between human endeavor and divine stricture, between free will and fate, sin and retribution, the moral struggle of the protagonist unfolded. In the hands of the tragedians, the conflicts and sufferings that had been straightforwardly and unreflectively portrayed in Homer and Hesiod were now subjected to the psychological and existential probings of a later, more critical temperament. What had been long-accepted absolutes were now searched, questioned, suffered through with a new consciousness of the human predicament. On the stage of the Dionysian religious festivals in Athens, the pronounced Greek sense of the heroic, balanced against and in integral relation to an equally acute awareness of pain, death, and fate, discharged itself in the context of mythic drama. And just as Homer was called the educator of Greece, so too were the tragedians expressive of the culture’s deepening spirit and shapers of its moral character, with the theatrical performances as much communal religious sacrament as artistic event.