ACADEMY & GALLERY Scientific Enlightenment, Div. 2 BOOK 2: Human Enlightenment of the First Axial 2.B.1. A genealogy of the philosophic enlightenment in classical Greece Chapter 19 Justice and the Problem of Minor Salvation in Plato's Republic: Part II 2007 by Lawrence C. Chin. The second argument. We see in the foregoing Platonic anthropology three types of men being identified, each naturally suited for one of the three classes in the completed polis, and who are each the type they are by virtue of their seeking the respective objects proper to them: the wisdom-loving (philosophon) seeks after wisdom and learning due to the predominance in him of logistikon, the honor-loving (philotimon, philonikon) after physical mastery, victory, recognition, and honor, due to the predominance in him of the spirited part, and the money-maker (philokerdes, chrematistikos) in whom the appetitive predominates, after money as a means to satisfying the desires of his body. These three types, moreover, so seek because of the pleasures that the respective objects they seek after provide: the pleasures of learning for the first, of recognition for the second, of the body for the third. Now, of these three types, each would claim his pleasure to be the best, i.e. the most pleasant (ηδίστη, 582). The money-maker will assert that, compared to gaining (κερδαίνειν; i.e. to the pleasures of food, drink, and sex that gaining provides in turn), the pleasure in being honored (την του τιμασθαι ηδονην) or in learning (την του μανθάνειν) is worth nothing; the lover of honor will believe the pleasure from money and the body to be a vulgar thing (φορτικήν τινα) and the pleasure from learning to be "smoke and nonsense" (καπνον και φλυαρίαν); and the lover of wisdom will consider all the other pleasures to be far behind (πόρρω) the pleasure of learning the truth as it is (του ειδέναι ταληθες όπηι έχει; 581 d 5 - e). Who is right then? What is the standard by which we can judge that only the philosopher is right in regarding his pleasure as the pleasantest? The previous argument might have established the pleasures of philosophic contemplation as superior to pleasures of the body in that the former set the human interior in order, while the latter sorts do just the opposite, so that the former lead to happiness while the latter to unhappiness. But now Plato is struggling with the problem of proving that philosophic contemplation in itself is more pleasurable than consumption or sex. There are two parts to the first of the Platonic-Socratic arguments for this. Firstly, Plato argues that the pleasure from the satisfaction of appetite, from consumption or dissipation (proper to philokerdes), is the most basic, accessible to all human beings, belonging to the lowest denominator, while the pleasure of learning (of being: tou ta onta maqanein) belongs to the "highest", latest developmental stage, only accessible to a few who have reached that stage. The philosophon would have already known what the pleasure of consumption and sex is like (and the pleasure of victory and honor as well), having passed through long ago that lowest stage (and then the intermediate stage of honor-loving) before reaching the highest developmental stage, but the philokerdes, being stuck in the lowest developmental stage, does not -- and is out of the simpleness of his mind unable to -- know what the pleasure involved in learning truth as it is (tou manqanein authn thn alhqeian oion estin) is like. Therefore the philosophon can judge best, having had experiences of all three types of pleasure (582 d: εμπειρίας μεν αρα... ενεκα κάλλιστα των ανδρων κρίνει ουτος): if he claims the pleasure of learning to be the pleasantest of all, he would be right. The honor-lover is in the middle, being right in judging the pleasure of honor and recognition to be pleasanter than that of food, drink, and sex, but, like the money-maker, unable to comprehend the pleasure of learning; while the money-maker cannot understand the pleasure of honor as well as that of learning, and is in no position to accurately assess these two types of pleasure in relation to the fulfillment of his craving for food, sex, drinks, and luxury. The second part of the first argument consists in the assertion that the instrument of judgment "is not the instrument of the lover of gain or the lover of honor but that of the lover of wisdom" (582d 8) since it is by experience (εμπειρίαι), prudence (φρονήσει), but especially by argument (logos) that the judgment as to the quality and intensity of pleasures must be made (δειν κρίνεσθαι), and these constitute precisely the means with which we philosophize. The judgment made by the philosopher -- here regarding the relative quality and intensity of different types of pleasures -- then would be "truer" as compared with the judgments made by the other two (582e 9). Let us seriously examine this argument (in two parts) for its validity. In regard to the first part, note that, in today's psychology, we find many instances of the same type of linear, one-way developmental scheme as Plato's for pleasures, whether it be the three psychosexual stages of Freud's, elaborated in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and which are also concerned with the evolution of pleasure or eros; the psychosocial stages of Erik Erikson's; the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs"; or Lawrence Kohlberg's moral development schema. We here single out Maslow's hierarchy for comparison because the criticism to which it has been subjected applies equally well to Plato's schema here. Maslow's hierarchy (Figure above) "ascends from simple biological needs to complex psychological motives, culminating in 'self-actualization' and 'self-transcendence'" (Carole Wade and Carol Tavris, Psychology, 1987, p. 379), which itself culminates in the "peak experience" of the mystics, as we have seen (Introduction). Plato's hierarchy operates similarly, the satisfaction of appetite being that of simple biological needs, and the desire for others' recognition of one's worth (honor) corresponding naturally to the middle segments of Maslow's hierarchy, the need for love, belonging, self-esteem, and respect, while the aesthetic needs and self-actualization respond to the contemplation on truth as it is -- and Aristotle is to explicitly articulate an identity between these two sides. The point here is that "Maslow argued that your needs must be met at each level before you can even think of the matters posed by the level above it" (ibid.). Plato's similar view is brought out in Diotima's speech in Symposium.1 Like Maslow's schema, then, Plato's second argument (the first part thereof) presupposes, firstly, that one has to pass through the lower stages of the fulfillment of bodily functions and of honorable recognition by others before reaching the highest stage of philosophic contemplation, and, secondly, that the philosopher, having experienced all types of pleasure in this way, would actually regard the pleasure from philosophic contemplation as superior to (i.e. pleasanter than), say, the pleasure from heterosexual encounters. Is this true? The experiential motivation for the two presuppositions seems to be that, relatively, so few people seem capable of understanding and practicing philosophy, such that it must be a "higher activity", and that, furthermore, philosophy is, given its difficulty, a much more precious thing to which one would prefer nothing else. But the consideration of Maslow's case might convince us otherwise. A fatal problem with Maslow's hierarchy is that "it is just as possible to organize human needs horizontally instead of vertically. One could argue that people have simultaneous needs for basic physical comfort and safety and for understanding, self-esteem, and competence... [Then,] 'higher' needs may overcome 'lower' ones. Human history is full of examples of people who would rather starve than be humiliated (a 'self-esteem' need), rather die of torture than sacrifice their convictions, rather explore, risk, or create new art than be safe and secure at home" (ibid., p. 380). Reversely, those who are "self-actualizing" could still desire greatly the satisfaction of physical needs such as for food and sex, and we can also think of examples of people who would rather give up convictions than sacrifice the opportunities for eating, drinking, and whoring. It does not seem to be the case that one can realize the higher experiences -- such as self-actualization and peak experience -- only after one has already satisfied the lower needs, such as for love and belonging, for sexual and sensual intimacy, for touching, even. In the same way, one can argue that the three types of pleasures Plato has isolated in his tripartite division of the soul are probably better organized horizontally just as Maslow's needs should be. Because of this breakdown of a linear, irreversible progression from the biological through the psychological to the intellectual needs and satisfaction, from the simple to the complex, the objective judgment as to the worthiness or quality of the pleasure in question which depends on this progression breaks down also. Indeed, today's academia is filled with "intellectuals" who have never passed through the "lower stages"; who, in fact, come to the life of the intellect as a substitute for, or as sublimation of, the "lower pleasures". The possessiveness with which many of them comport themselves toward their books -- every book read must be had, no book is to be lent out, the loss of the books had makes for occasion of the greatest fear -- makes manifest the fact that, in studying, they are infants groping after objects of satisfaction, books and knowledge being sublimated nourishment or milk of which they perhaps have not had their fill during infancy. We have considered these introverted, socially disabled "subhumans" ("The Consumerization of Mind and Culture"), who excel others of their kind, other socially disabled subhumans who today people the mental health system in advanced countries: for the subhuman kind is of two sorts, the intellectual sort in universities, and the non-intellectual sort in the mental health system. It would in fact be hypocritical for the "intellectual subhumans" to shout that they live in a greater amount of more preferable pleasure than do the rich playboys versed in the night life. They have been somewhat forced into their niche, from which they would get out if they could. Finally, a gifted philosophy major can easily be imagined to have met the love of his life at long last and lost interest in philosophy altogether. The pleasures of the body are neither necessarily "pre-requisite" to the pleasures of the intellect, nor less preferable than these. It seems that Plato has failed in the first part of his second argument; perhaps a truly happy life -- still a just life -- is not one where the higher of the pleasures excludes the lower ones, but is complemented by and organizes these others according to a certain proportion (logon), all the pleasures themselves being incommensurable one with another. We shall see later that Plato has perhaps in the end, and Aristotle has certainly in Nicomachean Ethics, come to such conclusion. In the meantime, we may offer other reasons than the quality of the pleasures themselves for which the pleasures of the intellect would be preferable to the pleasures of the body. (Other reasons than, that is, the order of the soul or interior.) We may point out that the pleasure from the satisfaction of appetites and of sexual, sensual, and romantic needs can be easily taken away -- such as when an accident or market shift suddenly deprives one of all one's wealth or when one's love suddenly takes off without a word, never to be seen again -- while the satisfaction resulting from the theoretical understanding of how the universe works stays with oneself permanently, less subject to the vicissitude of social life. This finds echo in Aristotle's later observation that intellectual satisfaction requires little or no external equipment. This is not an argument confirming that the intellectual pleasures are more pleasant than the basic pleasures, but only that they are more secure -- and preferable in this way to the latter.2 Secondly, a person can already have had enough, or so much bodily pleasures (e.g. sex), as to no longer find them pleasurable, as to no longer need them. Or, in a similar way, as Cephalus comments in the very beginning, when a man gets old and his body declines, i.e. when he is no longer capable of bodily pleasures and when the soul is automatically purified in a way, then turns he all of a sudden to the "pleasures of speech" ("pleasures of the intellect"; 329 c - d; Bloom, ibid., p. 313). In other words, when a person is young, the pleasures of the body competes powerfully with those of learning, with those of the soul. But a well-ordered man by nature is presumably a person of such type that, while growing up, or as he starts traversing through his life-cycle, he gets to satisfy all his lower, bodily, emotional, and relational needs, so that by adulthood he is ready to devote himself entirely to theoretical, philosophical contemplation, can find the greatest, or rather the most satisfying, pleasure therein, and will thus become the happiest. In other words, it seems that, if the horizontally organized pleasures are indeed traversed vertically in the right developmental order, Plato's second argument would be valid. But this shows that the pleasures of the soul (of the intellect) are longer lasting -- in addition to being more secure -- than those of the body, as they never decline in a person who loves wisdom since youth, even as he loses interests in things sexual in old age. This fact is amply demonstrated in some of the legends about famous tyrants, of whom it is said that after orgy on a daily basis with as many women as they had their eyes on and found pleasing, they eventually became numb in heterosexual matter, fell into depression because women could no longer give them the pleasures for which they live, and had had to resort to using pretty boys in order to feel pleasures again. (Such is said of Hong of Taiping Rebellion, for instance; ibid.) This is then the second aspect of intellectual pleasures that makes them preferable to the pleasures of the body. The insertion of Cephalus' speech concerning sex means that Plato must be aware of this aspect. On the other hand, the preferability of the philosophic pleasures to the somatic ones that we have thusly demonstrated, it should be kept in mind, constitutes no denial of the former admission that pleasures from the body and from sexual love in particular are not necessarily commensurable with the pleasures from contemplation and learning. One cannot study or contemplate all the time; during the "breaks", one may very well seek some "happiness" in sexual companionship or in other pleasures of consumption. On the other hand, even when one really loves the person, sometimes one wants to take a break, and be alone to contemplate on the laws of nature. We would then come back to Aristotle's later -- and possibly Plato's final -- conclusion mentioned just above, a more "humane" version of philosopher, which we will see below. Before moving on to the critique of the second part of Plato's second argument, we may mention Eric Brown's (ibid.) alternative interpretation of the first part of this argument which does not produce as Plato's underlying view a linear, hierarchical organization of pleasures from the most basic to the most developed, but rather a horizontal organization of which the philosopher takes up a greater share than do the money-maker and the honor-lover. "It has sometimes been thought that the philosopher cannot be better off in experience, for the philosopher has never lived as an adult who is fully committed to the pleasures of the money-lover. But this point does not disable Socrates' argument. The philosopher does not have exactly the experience that the money-lover has, but the philosopher has far more experience of the money-lover's pleasures than the money-lover has of the philosopher's pleasures. The comparative judgment is enough to secure Socrates' conclusion: because the philosopher is a better judge than the others, the philosopher's judgment has a better claim on the truth. So we have some reason for thinking that the activities desired by the money-lover and those desired by the honor-lover are less pleasurable than the philosopher's activities." This version is however open to the same objection as our version is, namely, that we may quite frequently encounter in today's academia "philosophers" who with their extreme introversion and social disability have never had the experience that the money-lover has had, and that even if they have they may nonetheless choose the experience of the money-lover if the occasion arises of a mutually exclusive choice between the two. We then have to come back to the same demonstration of the preferability of the intellectual pleasures not in terms of the quality of the pleasures themselves but in terms of their durability and security. The problem with the second part of the argument concerns Plato's assumption that the act of judgment (krinein) as to the quality and intensity of pleasure is an intellectual affair. Is it really true -- while it is certainly correct that wealth and gain (ploutoV, kerdeV) are not instrument with which to form judgment -- that appetite cannot judge? Does it rather fit our experience better that pleasures -- at least some of them, such as from food, drink, and sex -- are indeed sensed, or perceived, by the appetite as to their quality and intensity, while logos (or our intellect) is only consciousness and acknowledgment of the judgment thus already made? This does not as yet invalidate this second part of Plato's argument; it does point up however a possible inaccuracy in Plato's psychology. The third argument. Here Plato's Socrates points out that what ordinary people (those of opinions) judge to be pleasure and pain may not be pleasure and pain at all, such as when they are in pain (lupwntai), as in sickness, and extol as most pleasant not enjoyment but rather the absence of pain and the repose (hsucian) from it (583d 7), or when they judge the repose from, or cessation of, pleasure (or the enjoyment they are having: cairwn) to be painful (583e), even though repose itself is neither pain nor pleasure but something in the middle between the these two (583c 6). That is, unthoughtful, people have the tendency to confuse, without realizing it, the recovery from pain with true pleasure and the loss of pleasure with true pain. This can be represented diagrammatically: ----------- pleasure ----------- neither: sensationlessness ----------- pain The sensationless state is confused with pleasure because it is better than pain and with pain because it is worse than pleasure. Then would you be surprised if those who are inexperienced in truth [i.e. the philokerdes and the philotimon] also have unhealthy opinions about many other things and are disposed toward pleasure and pain and what's between them in such a way that, when they are brought to the painful, they suppose truly and are really in pain, but, when brought from the painful to the in-between, they seriously suppose they have come to fulfillment and pleasure; and, as though out of lack of experience of white they looked from gray to black, out of lack of experience of pleasure they look from pain to the painless and are deceived? (584e 7 - 585a 6) θαυμάζοις αν ουν ει και οι άπειροι αληθείας περι πολλων τε άλλων μη υγιεις δόξας έχουσιν, πρός τε ηδονην και λύπην και το μεταξυ τούτων ουτω διάκεινται, ώστε, όταν μεν επι το λυπηρον φέρωνται, αληθη τε οίονται και τωι όντι λυπουνται, όταν δε απο λύπης επι το μεταξύ, σφόδρα μεν οίονται προς πληρώσει τε και ηδονηι γίγνεσθαι, ώσπερ προς μέλαν φαιον αποσκοπουντες απειρίαι λευκου, και προς το άλυπον ούτω λύπην αφορωντες απειρίαι ηδονης απατωνται; Now Plato's Socrates brings in another aspect. Pleasure in our immediate experience is the sensation of fullness, that of the body experienced as body's emptiness' (κενότης: hunger, thirst, "sexual heat") being filled up to fullness and that of the soul (we say "mind" today) as the souls' emptiness' (ignorance, imprudence: άγνοια, αφροσύνη) being filled up with knowledge (episteme). Now, the objects of knowledge, the eidoi, are "more of being", participate more in pure being (μαλλον καθαρας ουσιας μετέχειν), insofar as they are "always the same, immortal, true" (το του αει ομοίου εχόμενον και αθανάτου και αληθείας) while the objects of hunger, thirst, and sexual desires -- food, drinks, body -- are "less of being", partake less of being, insofar as they are "never the same and mortal" (το μηδέποτε ομοίου και θνητου; 585 c). In addition, the soul, in search of the pleasures proper to itself, as the eidos of life (the fourth argument for the immortality of the soul in Phaedo), is itself "more being" than is the body in search of its own pleasures. Thus: ουκουν το των μαλλον όντων πληρούμενον και αυτο μαλλον ον όντως μαλλον πληρουται η το των ηττον όντων και αυτο ηττον ον; Isn't what is full of things that are more [lit. of "more" beings], and itself is more [i.e. "more" in being], really fuller than what is full of things that are less [lit. of "less" beings] and itself is less [i.e. "less" in being]? ει αρα το πληρουσθαι των φύσει προσηκόντων ηδύ εστι, το τωι όντι και των όντων πληρούμενον μαλλον μαλλον όντως τε και αληθεστέρως χαίρειν αν ποιοι ηδονηι αληθει, το δε των ηττον όντων μεταλαμβάνον ηττόν τε αν αληθως και βεβαίως πληροιτο και απιστοτέρας αν ηδονης και ηττον αληθους μεταλαμβάνοι. Therefore, if it is pleasant to become full of what is by nature suitable, that which is more really full of things that are more would cause one to enjoy true pleasure more really and truly, while what partakes in things that are less would be less truly and surely full and would partake in a pleasure less trustworthy and less true (585 d 7 - e 3). οι αρα φρονήσεως και αρετης άπειροι, ευωχίαις δε και τοις τοιούτοις αει συνόντες, κάτω, ως έοικεν, και μέχρι πάλιν προς το μεταξυ φέρονταί τε και ταύτηι πλανωνται δια βίου, υπερβάντες δε τουτο προς το αληθως άνω ούτε ανέβλεψαν πώποτε ούτε ηνέχθησαν, ουδε του όντος τωι όντι επληρώθησαν, ουδε βεβαίου τε και καθαρας ηδονης εγεύσαντο, αλλα βοσκημάτων δίκην κάτω αει βλέποντες και κεκυφότες εις γην και εις τραπέζας βόσκονται χορταζόμενοι και οχεύοντες... Therefore, those who have no experience of prudence and virtue but are always living with feasts and the like [such as orgy] are, it seems, brought down [i.e. to repose] and then back again to the middle [i.e. pleasure from consumption] and throughout life wander in this way; but since they don't go beyond this, they don't look upward toward what is truly above [i.e. the theoretical pleasure of "learning the natural characteristics of the things which are"; 582b 5], nor are they ever brought to it; and they aren't filled with what really is, nor do they taste of a pleasure that is sure and pure; rather, after the fashion of cattle, always looking down and with their heads bent to earth and table, they feed, fattening themselves and copulating... (586a - 586b 4). This gives another hierarchy of pleasures: fullness of soul ----------- emptiness of soul ----------- fullness of body ----------- emptiness of body This hierarchy would correspond with the previous one if the pleasures of the body -- the fullness of the stomach and the satiated rest from sexual intercourse -- are not pleasures at all, but merely the repose from the pain which results from lack; and if the emptiness of our mind does not cause pain -- which would strike us as manifestly true after a phenomenological examination of the common, ignorant people.3 These two points appear valid, and the first is hinted at in Gorgias where Socrates has Callicles agree that (1) want or desire (ένδειαν και επιθυμίαν, such as thirst), as lack, is painful (ανιαρον); that (2) the satisfaction (or filling: πλήρωσις) of want, such as during drinking, is pleasurable and causes one to have enjoyment (κατα το πίνειν χαίρειν); and that the conclusion results that one enjoys oneself, though in pain at the same time, when one drinks while thirsty (λυπούμενον χαίρειν άμα, όταν διψωντα πίνειν: 496 d - 497). Though there the argument is for the purpose of demonstrating that the pleasant is different from the good, the contradiction can only be resolved by the more careful phenomenological description that drinking during thirst results only in the in-progress cessation of pain, the gradual diminution of pain by the gradual filling-up of a lack. In accordance with the preceding interpretation of the "theory of forms" in the Republic, "more of being" or "partaking more in being" means "greater purity in manifesting the single eidos at issue". The eidoi of the beautiful and the good at Plato's own time, or the laws of the universe as represented in Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2007), "are more" and "fill more" than food or the living body lusted after in this sense, that, if they are "pleasure-causing", they are not at the same time "pain-causing". That this sense of being -- in the sense of showing -- is indeed what Plato has intended is supported by his concluding statement after his introduction of the image of the hierarchy of pleasures: Then isn't it also necessary that the pleasures [the money-makers] live with be mixed with pains -- mere phantoms and shadow paintings of true pleasure?.... (586 c) αρ' ουν ουκ ανάγκη και ηδοναις συνειναι μεμειγμέναις λύπαις, ειδώλοις της αληθους ηδονης και εσκιαγραφημέναις.... These two interpretations of the meaning of Plato's third argument do not mesh. The first result -- that the money-making, appetitive man has perhaps confused the repose from pleasure with genuine pleasure -- is not the same as the second -- that the lesser being of the objects of his desires and the consequent lesser being of his pleasures mean that his pleasures are mixed with pain. A confusion seems to reign here, such that one cannot really be sure whether Plato has given in the Republic as proofs for the desirability of justice in itself a total of four or five of them.4 Aristotle's solutions in respect to Plato's second argument (the first part) Aristotle's thinking in regard to minor salvation is for the most part identical with Plato's, but with some elaboration. Minor salvation in Aristotle's ethics (Nicomachean Ethics)5 is identified, just as in Plato's thinking, as "happiness" (ευδαιμονία), and it consists, elaboration aside, essentially in the same thing as with Plato. Happiness Aristotle identifies as the one thing in life pursued as an end in itself (to kaq'auto diwkton) rather than something which is pursued as a means to something else (to di'eteron diwkton; I vii 4 - 5). τέλειον δή τι φαίνεται και αύταρκες η ευδαιμονία, των πρακτων ουσα τέλος (I vii 8) Happiness appears to be something final and self-sufficient, being the end of all actions. Plato's identification of justice (of the soul) with (the greatest) happiness and with philosophic contemplation is accepted by Aristotle -- and by most philosophers in the world until the onset of modernity -- but the latter specifically takes into account the fact of the soul's embodiment which makes its happiness ultimately and necessarily a composite of more than pure contemplation but of a moderate amount of all things, which fact therefore brings in the problem of instrumentality. That is, in answering the question, "How to be happy?", Aristotle recognizes that the above self-sufficiency or autarky of happiness does not mean a life of isolation (bion monwthn) but a life with friends, spouse, children, parents, and fellow citizens, since "human" -- that is, the embodied soul -- "is by nature a social being" (φύσει πολιτίκον ο ανθρωπος; I vii 6 - 7). We will return to the problem of instrumentality after considering Aristotle's elaboration of the eidos of virtue and his view regarding philosophic contemplation. Aristotle's conception of virtue (arete) is also the same as Plato's (or the "Greek" generally), but he expresses it differently. Aristotle defines happiness as, or as caused by, the active exercise of our natural faculties in conformity with virtue (κύριαι δ'εισιν αι κατ'αρετην ενέργειαι της εύδαιμονίας; I x 9). His conception of human being is rather like the Romantics', as "blossoming", that each individual is born as a seed with a unique design imprinted within that must be allowed to unfold through one's life course; if the person unfolds his or her potential to the maximal degree, then happiness results. And our "potential" breaks down to two kinds: doing and contemplating (πραξις, θεωρήσις). We have hence two types of virtues (virtues as the maximal expression of our potential and so as our means to happiness): the intellectual (τας διανοητικας) and moral (τας ηθικας) in conformity with Aristotle's own version of the tripartite structure of the soul(-and-body). "Virtue", the excellence or maximal functioning of something, here in the moral domain takes on the explicit qualification of the famous rule of the Golden Mean: neither excessive, nor deficient, exercise of our functions. This is how he clarifies and complements Plato's discussion. Just as physical strength is destroyed by either too much or too little exercise of our body, and health by either too much or too little food and drinks, so virtues in the moral domain -- leading to happiness -- are found, e.g. in the case of courage, by neither shunning and fearing everything on the one extreme (cowardice) nor being completely unafraid of anything on the other (foolhardiness), or, in the case of moderation, by neither indulging in every possible pleasure on the one extreme (incontinence) nor turning one's back on every pleasure on the other (asceticism is not endorsed!). In other words, whereas badness either falls short of or exceeds the right measure, virtue discovers the mean. But virtue is a maximum in terms of best functioning. (Note that for Aristotle a gentleman, kaloskagathos, is he who neither becomes excessively angry at the sight of injustice nor is not angered by it at all: a person should have a moderate amount of moral indignation.) ______________________________________________________________________ | Plato | Aristotle | Aristotle's virtues | |_____________|_________________________|______________________________| | | | (sophian, | |philomathe --|----> logon --| ------|---> dianoetikas sunesin, | | | |-- soul | phronesin) | |philotima ---|----> alogon -| ------|---> ethikas (eleutherioteta, | | | (epithume- | sophrosunen) | | | tikon, orek- | | | | tikon) | | | | | | |philokerdes -|---> phutikon |-- body | | |_____________|_________________________|______________________________| The correspondence between Plato's and Aristotle's anthropological tripartite structure The virtues Aristotle identifies are: ελευθεριότητα "liberality"; σωφροσυνην "temperance" or "moderation"; σοφίαν "wisdom"; σύνεσιν "intelligence"; φρόνησιν "prudence", or practical wisdom as opposed to speculative, theoretical wisdom. We thus see that in Aristotle's "tripartite structure" of human being (not just of the soul), the rational part (logon) consists of two sub-divisions: "one whereby we contemplate those things whose first principles are invariable." (εν μεν ωι θεωρουμεν τα τοιαυτα των οντων οσων αι αρχαι μη ενδέχονται αλλως εχειν; VI i 5.) This is episteme (VI iv 3) and its virtue is of the theoretical type (theoretike dianoia). The other is that "whereby we contemplate those things which admit of variation (εν δε ωι τα ενδεχόμενα; VI i 5). This is either doing, practical intelligence in prudence (pratike, phronesis), or making (poiesis), such as art (techne). Since Aristotle considers human goodness to be only virtues of the soul, happiness can only be the exercises of logon and alogon in accordance with their respective virtues (epithymetikon exercised to the maximal in respect to functioning, for instance, i.e. in moderation in respect to quantity, results in "liberality"); the exercise of bodily functions doesn't even figure into happiness (αρετην δε λέγομεν ανθρωπινην ου την του σώματος αλλα την της ψυχης. και την ευδαιμονία δε ψυχης ενέργειαν λέγομεν; I xiii 6). This merely continues Plato's scheme of things, where epithymetikon (there referring to the appetitive) has no virtue of its own. Happiness of the alogon consists in moral virtues; but moral virtues, and so happiness, require external equipment (I viii, 15 - 7), whereas happiness of logon does not (X vii, 4). To embody "liberality", for instance, one needs friends with whom to be so, political office or power with which to impart favors to others, or wealth to lend to others. At the very least, the just person needs the presence of other people toward whom he or she shall act justly. But the philosopher can contemplate on truth even when all by himself. We can see that Aristotle is far more perceptive than Plato in seeing the context over which a person has no control but which is either necessary for or conducive to his or her happiness. Aristotle even notes that a person with unattractive appearance or of ill-birth is less likely to be happy. Toward the end Aristotle also considers the contemplative life to be the "happiest" because (1) it is the highest human development such that the contemplative philosopher is, virtuously, exercising his or her naturally given talents, or unfolding his or her naturally given blue print, to the fullest (X vii, 1; this is almost the same as Plato's second argument, but not exactly); and (2) because it is self-sufficient (autarkes); whereas the life of moral virtues is happiness only to a secondary degree (δευτέρως: X viii 1). Now it seems that Aristotle, in regarding again the pleasure in contemplation as the highest, has lost his better insight in comparison with Plato's, but he seems immediately to have fixed the Platonic flaw by adding, firstly: "those things are actually valuable and pleasant which appear so to the good [i.e. orderly in soul] man" (X vi 5: και τίμια και ηδέα εστι τα τωι σπουδαίωι τοιαύτα οντα). The tyrannic man's judgment doesn't count. This must mean that true happiness and true pleasures are those that contribute to the order of the soul rather than those dissipating its order (as in amusement). In this way, when the philosopher and the tyrant each judge their respective pleasures to be superior to the other, the philosopher would be right and the tyrant wrong because the philosopher is the spoudaios with an orderly soul whose judgment -- always in relation to the order of his soul -- counts! This kind of thinking presupposes that order is the supreme good, i.e. the teleological point. We will return to this below. However much Aristotle might agree with Plato that the lone contemplating philosopher represents the highest developed human, the fullest actualization of human potential, he still admits: "But the philosopher being a human being will also need external well-being. For [human] nature is not sufficient toward contemplation [theorein]; he must also have bodily health, food, and other requirements [therapeian]." (δεήσει δε και της εκτος ευημερίας ανθρώπωι οντι. ου γαρ αυταρκης η φυσις προς το θεωρειν, αλλα δει και το σωμα υγιαίνειν και τροφην και την λοιπην θεραπείαν υπάρχειν. X viii, 9.) Those other therapeian presumably include the satisfaction of romantic and sexual needs and the need for friendship (philia). This is Aristotle's second conclusion. The greatest happiness is a composite: not just the pleasure of philosophic and scientific learning, but also the health of the body and a moderate satisfaction of its (and psychological) needs to the extent that it be beneficial to and maintain bodily (and psychological) health. Not the complete denial of bodily needs, not asceticism, though not a luxurious life either. The philosopher, in being human, in being embodied, should have, if he is to be happy, a moderate amount of everything a human being usually needs and wants, for his body as well as for his soul ("mind"). Now, this second conclusion of Aristotle's converges with the earlier admission of the incommensurability of pleasures. This constitutes an important modification of the conclusion of the first argument as well. In his image of the "just person" as the happy philosopher, in his image of the liberated prisoner who has gone out of the cave to dwell blissfully in sunlight, in the light of Agathon, in truth, Plato seems to give the impression that the happiest possible man is he who has seen the Agathon and let his interior be ordered by it and stays in this wise, alone by himself, outside the cave (outside society), without any need for the shadows inside the cave (things from society, the worldly things that are mere illusions). Within the framework of our "religious" interpretation of Plato, this would mean that Plato thinks that asceticism of the most severe sort, practiced for the sake of major salvation, would in and by itself constitute the greatest possible happiness -- minor salvation flowing directly from major salvation. Now, with Aristotle, it seems that this is not so. Truth alone does not provide happiness in its fullest, but only in combination with illusions. Asceticism is clearly denied by Aristotle as the path toward happiness when he posits the Golden Mean in the matter of the pursuit of moral virtues for happiness' sake. This is however not a denial of the conclusion of the first argument that the tyrant, an exemplary slave to the desires of his body, is the most wretched. For all the power he has acquired as means for feeding the insatiable beast or filling the leaky jar in him, he yet lacks some essential of the external instrument that we have now acknowledged in the philosopher's case is required for his blossoming in happiness: i.e. friendship. Aristotle has defined friendship as consisting of three types, constituted by either the mutual providing of pleasure or of utility, or by the genuine mutual appreciation of virtues (and so justice) in the other. Friendship based on the mutual recognition of virtue is the most genuine friendship -- friendship to the fullest. Only this type of friendship involves the persons in their whole being, the other two being rather incidental, and it consists in an altruistic wish for the friend to live and exist for his or her own sake. ("This person is a precious being, magnificent order-formation against the arrow of time," to speak in our thermodynamic framework of interpretation.) The tyrant, as the description goes in the end of Book VIII and the beginning of Book IX, kills, purges, and besides that, knows only to exploit and use others and then to quickly abandon them once he has exhausted their usefulness or the pleasures they can provide. He seeks only utilities and pleasures in others, but never virtues, because he does not understand these. Only a virtuous person can recognize another virtuous person. "Therefore [the tyrants] live their whole life without ever being friends of anyone, always one man's master or another's slave. The tyrannic nature never has a taste of freedom or true friendship" (Republic, 576 a 2: εν παντι άρα τωι βιώι ζωσι φίλοι μεν ουδέποτε ουδενί, αει δέ του δεσπόζοντες η δουλεύοντες άλλωι, ελευθερίας δε και φιλίας αληθους τυραννικη φύσις αει άγευστος). Has Plato come as well to the conclusion that the happiest philosopher is not an ascetic but pursues all pleasures in moderation? There are hints that Plato would agree with the realistic, "humane" portrayal of the philosopher which Aristotle has given as truly the happiest person, a contemplator who nevertheless allows the philokerdes and the philotimon in his interior to pursue in moderate amount the pleasure of gain and consumption (and of romance and sexuality, presumably) and the pleasure of being honored and recognized -- and becomes happy, because he has so allowed under the guidance of knowledge and argument (τηι επιστήμηι και λογωι) which carefully prescribe the moderate amount. This is perhaps the meaning of the mysterious Socratic concluding statement that appears immediately after "all the proofs" for the philosophic pleasures' superior pleasantness have been presented: Therefore, when all the soul follows the philosophic and is not factious, the result is that each part may, so far as other things are concerned, mind its own business and be just and, in particular, enjoy its own pleasures, the best pleasures, and, to the greatest possible extent, the truest pleasures... [On the contrary] when one of the other parts gets control, the result is that it can't discover its own pleasure and compels the others to pursue an alien and untrue pleasure (586 e 3 - a 4). τωι φιλοσόφωι άρα επομένης απάσης της ψυχης και μη στασιαζούσης εκάστωι τωι μέρει υπάρχει εις τε ταλλα τα εαυτου πράττειν και δικαίωι ειναι, και δη και τας ηδονας τας εαυτου έκαστον και τας βελτίστας και εις το δυνατον τας αληθεστάτας καρπουσθαι... οταν δε αρα των ετέρων τι κρατήσηι, υπάρχει αυτωι μήτε την εαυτου ηδονην εξευρίσκειν, τά τε άλλ' αναγκάζειν αλλοτρίαν και μη αληθη ηδονην διώκειν. The happiest -- s/he who has attained true minor salvation and is the most just -- is this person in whose soul the philomathes rules even while carefully allowing the other two, lower components to pursue their respective pleasures. This is not the picture of an ascetic as seen in Phaedo. By the standard of this final conclusion, the tyrant is compared for the last time with his extreme opposite, the philosopher, in respect to the amount of pleasures and the extent of happiness in their respective lives. Earlier, after having constructed the paradigm of justice in a person, Socrates was ready to present the four forms of badness that are supposed to embody injustice in increasing degrees; but he did not have the chance to do so until after the presentation of the material that constitutes the metaphysical core of the Republic. Calling the kallipolis aristocratic, Socrates produced the four famous forms of badness on the supraorganismic scale, in order of increasing distance from the first, perfect embodiment of justice or order: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny; and calling "aristocratic" the person whose embodiment of justice had served as the model for the demonstration of true happiness in the first argument, he gave the four famous forms of badness on the scale of Person, in order of increasing falling-short of the first: the timocratic man, the oligarchic, the democratic (which Bloom translates as "man of the people"), and the tyrannic, these being the microcosmic versions of -- and each the dominant type of person in -- the former four "bad" regimes respectively. (Remember that the polis is the soul dominant in it written large.) No longer the three types of man, but the five types of man, are to constitute the overall context -- the system of anthropological classification -- in which the final comparison can be attempted. The tyrant now appears the most distant from "true pleasure," "a pleasure that is true and properly his own" while the king-aristocrat, the closest (πλειστον δη οιμαι αληθους ηδονης και οικείας ο τυραννος αφεστηξει, ο δε ολίγιστον; 587 b5). In fact, the king-aristocrat, who resembles the philosopher the most, lives 729 times more pleasantly than the tyrant! (587 e3; more on this below.)6 This whole problematic -- whether and how much the satisfaction of bodily desires, along with an emotional life (e.g. the need for human relationship), should factor into the constitution of human happiness, even that of the "highest developed": the failure of the means for major salvation in constituting the greatest possible happiness -- has its origin in the embodiment of the soul. This is why "true", uncomplicated happiness of the soul (its happiness without the involvement of external equipment) is not possible in this life, not until the soul separates from the body upon death and dwells in the realm of the forms (if it has practiced philosophy well during life, of course). This point constitutes the essence of Cephalus' speech from 328d - 329d of which mention was made earlier: the interference of the body in the life of the soul, its demand on the soul, is so great that the soul itself might be hindered in its pursuit of happiness were it to neglect completely the bodily demand. Only the intellective (calculative) component is intrinsic to the soul; the other two arise from its association with a body and society. This problem which the embodiment of the soul causes its happiness is also what engenders the political problem of the best city. The simple polis that is easily constructed during the first stage of poleogony -- this "city of necessity" -- is in fact the best polis and equivalent to a disembodied soul. It is principally the desires of the body which cause the citizens to want riches (noosphere consumption), such that the polis has to complexify in its division of labor... And the city in regard to its political form (politeia) therewith acquires a life-cycle also, a temporal dimension -- the devolution or degeneration of the regimes described in Book IX (see below), for the city of necessity can never degenerate -- it is stable for all time because it in its simplicity is already "at the bottommost". We may at this last juncture, at the end of our exposition of Plato's arguments for the desirability of justice even under the condition of un-notice by gods and humans alike, take up the second of the mystery questions in daily life mentioned earlier: that is the question of the meaning of life. We have postponed the question till now so as to be able to answer it wholly without residue of qualification. The meaning or purpose of life in accordance with the foregoing Platonic viewpoint would be as R. E. Allen has noted: "the purpose [function, excellence, arete...] of life is to live... But if to live, then to live well, then to live courageously and wisely and temperately and justly", i.e. the meaning of life is to live "virtuously" (ibid., p. xxvi), that is, "orderly". The purpose of life is the maximization of life. But this acquires a further dimension with Plato's second and third argument that counter hedonism of the day which destroys order with a philosophic hedonism that is conducive to the right order of the soul: the purpose of life is also to live pleasurably -- "pleasure" referring here to its higher form, the pleasure of "forms", or of the laws of the universe in the contemporary world. (Contrast this answer with Ch'an Buddhism's and then with Neoconfucians' view on the matter.) This means that Plato's justice is in fact teleological and a form of hedonism above the doxic level: justice -- the order of the soul -- engenders a higher form of pleasure -- of learning and living well. Aristotle would certainly agree with this. Modern utilitarianism -- "the greatest good for the greatest number", "version of the second commandment in the order of the Mass, that thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (Allen, p. xxv) -- of which Mill and Bentham are the pioneering proponents may be teleological like Plato's "hedonism", but the pleasures that are regarded as "good" in this moral theory are only doxic (bodily) pleasures; hence to achieve the appearance of justice, the proponents have had to define "good" by taking into account others' pleasures. This is tied up with the previously mentioned questionable status of Plato's "moral philosophy". Plato's advocation of justice is teleological in both that "justice" as embodied by the philosophic life engenders a superior (more pleasant) form of pleasure and that it refers to a homeostatic state of living that leads to true happiness. Modern ethics (in the Anglophone world), on the other hand, has had difficulty in finding an objective basis on which to ground moral values because the teleological goods which the theorists find -- pleasures or fairness or whatever -- are dissociated from order, with which traditional "morals" form an integral. (Consider how Brown misses the point of the first argument.) Order is the condition of existence, of life, in a universe destined to "run down". That existence or living does itself according to itself (its condition) is a purpose internal to existence or living itself, as Allen has commented (ibid.). In this way the question concerning the objective status of values becomes non-applicable. But (true) pleasures and happiness as provided by the philosophic life is not the same as "good" (Plato emphasizes this in the Gorgias), but are "good" only insofar as the form of order -- politeia -- of which they are consequences is conditioned by the form of the Good: "The Dikaiosyne which imposes right order on the forces within the soul has its origin outside the soul" (Voegelin, ibid., p. 111). Order -- and the happiness that it engenders and the pleasures that accompany the activities constitutive of it -- is good because it participates in the idea of the Agathon. Once again we see at work in the Republic the same teleological view of the universe as that given explicitly in the Phaedo: the politeia -- the right relationship among the tripartite components -- is such because the cosmos is "designed" so to speak to be such. This is why politeia is identified as the natural, healthy state either of the soul or of the polis and is said to be a pattern (paradeigma) laid out "in heaven" (en ouranwi; 592 b 2). The point of the Republic: We should be just both for the sake of happiness in this life and for the sake of the happiness of the soul afterlife If justice is the greatest good -- aside from the Good itself -- then it is, as noted, both desirable in itself and for its consequences or rewards. Hence after providing three arguments demonstrating that being just is desirable in itself -- because it entails minor salvation -- Socrates in Book X returns to the "conventional way" of motivating us toward justice, motivating in view of the rewards extrinsic to it (Bloom, ibid., p. 434). The rewards are of two kinds, those in this life -- denying that being and seeming must always and even in the long run be inverse of one another, Socrates affirms that most of the time and in time the just person will reap good reputation and other good fruits from his fellow human beings as well as from gods (612 d - 613 c) -- and those in the afterlife especially, i.e. major salvation. Here Socrates first provides another argument for the immortality of the soul: for everything there is an evil correlative which can destroy it to the point of non-being (eiV to mh einai): rot for wood, rust for iron and bronze, and disease for the body. For the soul, the evil correlative, the sickness or unhealth peculiar to it, as seen, is injustice or vice. But since the injustice of the soul does not cause it to "not-be", it must be immortal. "No soul has ever died from vice, as a body has been destroyed by disease. Hence, there is no reason to assume that external events, such as the destruction of the body, will ever destroy the soul" (Voegelin, p. 130; Bloom in his Straussian approach is wrong in assuming that the Socratic argument for the immortality of the soul is not serious; ibid., p. 435). Again, the argument would work only if the underlying way of dividing up the world, the "categories" of the underlying worldview, were true or real -- if the "life" (metabolism-plus-consciousness) in a person were indeed an independently existing "thing" and not the emergent property of some underlying interactional network (of neurons and proteins). The ultimate reward for practicing justice consists therefore in this that the soul will separate from the body after death pure of disorderly configuration, of distortion, pollution, "dirt" -- "those which, because it feasts on earth, have grown around it in a wild, earthy, and rocky profusion as a result of those feast that are called happy [ευδαιμόνων λεγομένων, i.e. pleasures of the body]" (612 a) -- so as to enjoy a blissful, purely eidetic existence. The soul has then recovered its divine nature from its distortion through its community with the body. And a clue to that true nature, covered as it were by the barnacles, and crushed by the waves, of existence, is given through the soul's love of wisdom (philosophia), which is the yearning for its true company, the eternal. When in this life the soul strives for justice for its own sake, it follows that gleam of immortality toward a more perfect order, after the obstacles of bodily existence are removed (611 d - 612 a). (Voegelin, ibid.) The image of the soul now reverts from the relational back to the substantive. In parallel with the myth of the afterlife and the myth of the judgment of the dead at the end of Phaedo and Gorgias, the myth of Er or the Pamphylian myth is then given at the end of Book X to symbolize -- to provide a pictorial metaphor of -- the condition that the fate of the soul after life depends on what it does to itself via its body in this life. And also like the final myth in Phaedo, the myth of Er attempts in earnest to produce a pictorial construction of the structure of the cosmos. Thus this myth, just like that in Phaedo, is on the one hand metaphorical only but on the other a sort of scientific construct of the Presocratic type that is meant to represent as closely as possible reality, or the actual cosmos, as it is. "Er found rewards and punishments for just and unjust souls; but, more important, he also found an order of the universe which makes this world intelligible and provides a ground for the contemplative life. At the source of all things, Er saw that soul is the first principle of the cosmic order..." (Bloom, ibid., p. 427). The soul is the connecting joint between the therapy of the soul in this life through philosophy and justice and the way in which the cosmos is and functions. In both Gorgias and Republic the final myth tells of the terrible tortures which the unjust souls -- among whom the historical tyrants filled the ranks -- were made by gods to undergo in the nether portion of the after-world as punishment for their past injustices and/or in order to be cured of these -- and many, especially the tyrants', stayed in that realm for eternity, the disfigurement they had wrought on their soul through a life of vices being incurable -- and of the blissful stay in realm of immense beauty which the just souls -- such as "a philosopher's who had minded his own business and not been multi-practicing in his life" (φιλοσόφου τα αυτου πράξαντος και ου πολυπραγμονήσαντος εν τωι βίωι), as told in the Gorgias (526 c 4) -- were propelled by the order of gods to experience as rewards for their past justice. Again, given his notion of the soul as an independently existing entity with an order of its own, we must assume that Plato believed that something of such nature was true of the "after-life" and therefore devised myths not as lies but as metaphorical didactics motivating people toward justice and away from injustice. The final myth in the Republic, like what is professed in the Phaedo, but unlike the final myth in the Gorgias, also tells of the coming reincarnation of the souls after their completion of a thousand year of torment as punishment or a thousand year of bliss as reward. But in difference from the Phaedo, here the type of the next life is not determined automatically in accordance with the soul's justice or injustice in the previous life, but comes as a result of its free choice of daemons -- each entailing one particular kind of life -- thrown on the plain by Lachesis (Ananke's daughter) for it to pick. This results in complications unseen in the Phaedo, such that "[t]hose who formerly have led a dubious life, and as a consequence not only have suffered punishment themselves but also seen the suffering of others, generally are cautious"; but that "[t]hose who previously have lived a good life in a well-ordered polis, and participated in Arete from habit rather than from love of wisdom... are apt to make foolish choices. They will jump, for instance, at a glittering tyranny and discover too late the evil of the soul in it..." (Voegelin, p. 56). But -- only in this is the myth here in much accord with that in the Phaedo -- those who had found a philosopher as teacher and had properly philosophized would have learned to distinguish truly the good and the bad life, and choose a truly happy life. An additional element added in the myth in the Republic which was not found in the myth in the Phaedo is therefore the point of decision between the past and the future life, the lesson that "[t]he freedom of the present is not of much use unless the Arete of wisdom has been honored so that a right decision can be made, honoring it still more in the future" (Voegelin, p. 57 - 8). Now in regard to the structure of the cosmos in the final myth of the Republic which Er saw when he had reached its extremes, this seems to have been an elaborated version of that found in Parmenides' cosmogony. The myth, like those in the previous dialogues, clearly demonstrates that Plato has not broken through the compactness of the cosmological mode: it attempts to integrate the fate of human beings into the grand structure of the cosmos itself (microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism); the column of light with the spindle of Necessity (AnagkhV atrakton) by which the revolutions of the heavens turn recapitulates the axis mundi of the spatiality of mythic consciousness; and the souls' drinking from the water of Carelessness (Amelhta) in the plain of Forgetfulness (Lethe) before their reincarnation in order to forget the past life is also a universal element among the mythologies of the world. What Plato is doing, here as well as in others of his dialogues, is reintegrating the older myth of the cosmological mode -- whose place in the history of order has come to naught, it being destroyed "by reason and pleonexy" (Voegelin, p. 43) as we have seen, and as we shall see further -- into the new, more differentiated cosmological mode. The message of the traditional myth -- telling of karma, usually just like the Platonic one here or in the Gorgias -- was not wrong, Plato thinks, but its expression unseemly. And thus, Glaucon, a tale was saved and not lost [ -- so Bloom writes in footnote that "saved" here superficially means the saving of the tale by Er's return, but that "it also means that it has been given meaning, that it has been supported in a deeper sense that gives the surface plausibility" (p. 472)], and it could save us, if we were persuaded by it, and we shall make a good crossing of the river of Forgetfulness and not defile our soul. But if we are persuaded by me, holding that soul is immortal and capable of bearing all evils and all goods, we shall always keep to the upper road and practice justice with prudence in every way so that we shall be friends to ourselves and to the gods, both while we remain here and when we reap the rewards for it like the victors who go about gathering in the prizes. And so here and in the thousand year journey that we have described we shall fare well (621 d). και ούτως, ω Γλαύκων, μυθος εσώθη και ουκ απώλετο, και ημας αν σώσειεν, αν πειθώμεθα αυτωι, και τον της Λήθης ποταμον ευ διαβησόμεθα και την ψυχην ου μιανθησόμεθα. αλλ' αν εμοι πειθώμεθα, νομίζοντες αθάνατον ψυχην και δυνατην πάντα μεν κακα ανέχεσθαι, πάντα δε αγαθά, της άνω οδου αει εξόμεθα και δικαιοσύνην μετα φρονήσεως παντι τρόπωι επιτηδεύσομεν, ίνα και ημιν αυτοις φίλοι ωμεν και τοις θεοις, αυτου τε μένοντες ενθάδε, και επειδαν τα αθλα αυτης κομιζώμεθα, ώσπερ οι νικηφόροι περιαγειρόμενοι, και ενθάδε και εν τηι χιλίετει πορείαι, ην διεληλύθαμεν, ευ πράττωμεν. By way of concluding Plato's discourse on salvation and justice in the Republic, we might comment a bit on their contemporary relevance. We should not expect that Plato's discourse about justice's being the health of the soul -- or the health value of asceticism, i.e. the first argument -- might still hold perfectly today. We certainly do not believe in the immortality of this soul, its afterlife bliss assured by justice and philosophia, and its consequent fair or wretched reincarnation. In our endeavor to repeat past enlightenment of the functional perspective within our structural perspective, we must carefully distinguish what is repeatable and what is not. In our differentiated, structural perspective, metabolism and consciousness are not together constituting a "soul", but are only separate effects of physiology and neurology. A periodic and moderate amount of indulgence in sexual pleasures, for instance, disclosed today as physiological exercise of the body, is actually considered by contemporary physicians to contribute to health, relaxing the mind after intense study and helping its concentration afterwards, instead of being imagined as the trapping and damaging of a immaterial (originally "airy") soul by something of a material nature, such as Plato or the Yoga masters of past Hinduism who fast and meditate to the point of emaciation (i.e. asceticism) think! Consciousness has differentiated and enlarged its horizon since Plato, and his truth is not necessarily -- nor capable of being -- our truth. We might do well by heeding to Oswald Spengler's warning: Es gibt keine ewigen Wahrheiten. Jede Philosophie ist ein Ausdruck ihrer und nur ihrer Zeit... Der Unterschied liegt nicht zwischen unsterblichen und vergänglichen Lehren, sondern zwischen Lehren, welche eine Zeitlang oder niemals lebendig sind. (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, p. 55, 1923) There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is an expression of its and only its time... The distinction is not between immortal and perishable doctrines, but between doctrines, which lived for a time or were never living. The Platonic doctrine of the soul lived back then for a time but is dead today -- this is why a Straussian like Alan Bloom has had difficulty in accepting that even Plato-Socrates once believed in it. Although Spengler speaks from a view of independently traversed life-cycles of cultures -- and every discourse being no more than the expression of the inner spirit of this culture at a particular point of this traverse: the objectivity of the object of the discourse not admitted -- which we do not accept, although we adopt Voegelin's view of a differentiating consciousness's gradual approximation to truth which does have objective existence, although, finally, we have a notion of history as a linear thread twisted into spirals or with overlaps, Spengler's observation holds along the way of consciousness' differentiation and below the threshold of repetitions or overlaps in the spirals. Philosophy's conflict with poetry Plato's wish since early on has been, in the words of Voegelin, "the spiritual regeneration of Hellas through the Idea [i.e. the forms]", especially via the education of the younger generation, the formation of their souls into right order (politeia). It is for this sake that the true meaning -- or eidos -- of justice is demonstrated as, in our religiously oriented terminology, "minor salvation". This shall lead our thought into two directions: first, Plato's attack on poetry, and second, the use of the salvational state for worldly purposes ("immanentization"). Hellas degenerates because of the downward movement of the great differentiation of consciousness occurring during the Axial Age, which has either corrupted traditional devices into instrument of degeneration and or created new ones. In the Gorgias, Plato attacks rhetoric as a newly created instrument for corruption. In the Republic it is poetry which Plato attacks as the corrupted instrument. In the domain of therapy for the disorder (in soul and in society) generated, the newly differentiated philosophy thus contests with poetry, which is the old device for the formation of the order of the soul, for forming orderly persons that are of use to the polis ("great is the contest concerning becoming useful or bad": megaV... o agwn... to crhston h kakon genesqai; 608 b5). The downward movement of the differentiation of consciousness is destroying the meaning of traditional myth, transmitted via poetry, so much so that Plato takes for granted that the stories (muthoi) Hesiod and Homer tell are false or lies (pseudes; 377 d 5); while the upward movement has produced philosophic enlightenment as the new mechanism for forming orderly persons appropriate to the new level of development of the collective consciousness. "What is at stake in the conflict is neither the excellence of Homer as a poet, nor even the language of the myth, so brilliantly used by Plato himself [in his attempt to re-integrate the old form into the new consciousness], but the order of the soul" (Voegelin, ibid., p. 101). In the Republic the attack on poetry -- the pointing-out of its corrupting effects in the new age of consciousness -- is conducted in two places, in Book II - III and in Book X. Overall, the problem of poetry is of two-fold: On the one hand, the language of the myth becomes unseemly (Xenophanes) when the order of existence can be expressed more truly in the language of the philosopher's soul and its experience of transcendent divinity. On the other hand, the language of the myth becomes opaque when it passes through the minds of enlightened fundamentalists. When the myth is no longer experienced as the imaginative symbolization of divine forces, but as a realistic collection of dirty stories about the gods [this is because the compact order expressed by the anthropomorphic behavior of gods can no longer make sense within the new, more differentiated, order or nomos], the educational influence even of Homer can become disastrous... (ibid.). The corrective in regard to the second aspect of the problem takes up the form of a reform of poetry in the context of the discursive construction of the kallipolis, when Plato considers the educational value of this traditional instrument along with that of gymnastic and music. There Socrates, like Xenophanes before him, proposes the purification of the eidos of god in two ways, firstly, that, contrary to the unseemly or "mixed" representation of gods in mythic poetry (e.g. that Zeus is the cause of good and evil at the same time [379 d] or that Zeus and Themis are responsible for strife and contention among the gods), "god" should be the cause of only good things, and should only be good, and, secondly, that "god" should never change forms nor lie nor deceive (378 - 383). We note that, in the first mode also, much of the changes from polytheism to monotheism involves the same operation of "making the concepts embedded in old myths logically consistent" so as to eliminate unseemliness, hence Philo, the theological debate over the problem of evil (theodicy), and so on. Then Socrates proposes the elimination from mythic poetry of all that causes fear of death (such as the dreadful description of Hades) and incites emotions, insolence, and desires (such as the description of heroes' and gods' lamentation and grief or being in want of drink and meat; 386 - 391). These are not conducive to the formation of virtues and order in the soul of the young. The attack on poetry and especially Homer in Book X is geared toward the first aspect of the problem, the unsuitability of "mimetic poetry" for the experience Plato is seeking to express artistically. Here the context is rather the banishment of poetry from the kallipolis altogether. The "theory of forms" is made use of in the clarification of the problem. An eidos, such as of a couch, shows itself in three ways, either as one form by itself, in many couches of actual use, or in many images of the couch in actual use seen in arts such as in paintings. These roughly correspond to the upper portion of the divided line (ousia), the upper portion of the lower portion (horaton), and the lower portion of the lower portion (doxaston), respectively. Its existence (or showing) as one form is its existence in nature via the production of god (η εν τηι φύσει ουσα η... θεον εργάσασθαι; 597 b 5).7 Then it exists (shows itself) as many via the production of the craftsman who makes couches for those who wish to make use of it. Finally it exists in the painting via the artist's imitation of what the craftsman produces. There are thus three types of producers in order of decreasing understanding of the being of the thing in question (i.e. couch): its "nature-begetter" (futourgon, i.e. god) who understands best what "the couch" is; the craftsman (dhmiourgon) who knows enough of the couch to manufacture it (and those who wish to make use of it, crhsomenhn [601 d], belong also to this second level and know more of it than the craftsman -- now opposed to them as the maker, poihsousan -- though less than god in their understanding of the goodness and badness of the object when it comes to its use); and the imitator (mimhthn) who knows least about "the couch" because in his representation of the object as produced by the craftsman -- not as it exists in nature, by the hand of god -- he depicts only its appearance from one particular angle, not the total object seen from all angles: the imitation in arts of the object crafted is not even imitation of being as it is (προς το όν ως έχει) but only of its looking as it looks (προς το φαινόμενον, ως φαίνεται), not of truth (αληθείας) but only of looks (φαντάσματος) (598 b). The artist as the imitator and his works are at third remove from being (τριττα απέχοντα του όντος) just as the craftsman (and the user) and his works are at second remove. The poets -- and first among them, Homer -- figure among these artists at third remove since their depiction of the "virtues" of heroes is one grade below the "using" or "making" of virtues (by the heroes themselves and by the educators) which in its turn is one grade below the eidoi of virtues as they exist in nature. The first manner in which philosophy supersedes poetry as instrument of paideia is therefore its grasp of truth as it is -- a realm of being disclosed since the poets and which was undifferentiated and hidden formerly during the age of myth, epics, and poetry. To the differentiation of this realm on the objective side corresponds on the subjective side the differentiation in the soul of the logistikon which now, in the current "relational" model of the soul, is what imposes the right order therein. The second manner in which poetry has become unsuitable for the new age is another aspect of the same problem. Here the harmful effect of the emotional appeal of epic poetry on the order of the soul which has figured as the second target of the reform of poetry is elaborated upon. As mimetic representation fine art (such as painting) is illusionism; its representation of something can pose itself from afar as the real thing to the viewer by suppressing the logistikon in the latter. Poetry works in the same way as it is primarily concerned with representation of the emotions of heroes so as to please the public who are less interested in the emotionlessness that results from the rule of the logistikon than in passions and colorful characters that issue forth from the rule of the spirited and the appetitive part. In two ways then is poetry harmful to the order of the soul by suppressing the calculative therein and encouraging the lower pleasures and emotions of epithymetikon and the thymon to rulership in the soul, leading to injustice and vice (606 d). The good order of the soul, its politeia, must be established and continuously preserved through right Paideia (608 a - b). If the soul is regularly nourished by influences that play on its passions, the strength of the rational element, the logistikon, will be dissolved (605 b) and with it the faculty of measuring rightly (603 a); instead of the good a vicious (kake) politeia will be set up in the soul (605 b). In the surrounding society, the principal source of the vitiating Paideia is mimetic poetry, represented by Homer and Hesiod, by tragedy and comedy. Bloom elaborates on poetry's repression of the logistikon in terms of the suppression of any attempt to liberate oneself from convention -- from the shadows on the wall in the cave. Since the right order of the soul is established through the embodiment of the Agathon whose vision comes only through the faculty of the calculative, the falling-short of the right order means also the failure to extricate oneself from convention -- the sophistic society. The poet "must appeal to an audience [i.e. the public, the prisoners in the cave]; and in that sense he imitates the tastes and passions of that audience. But the tastes and passions of the audience have been formed by the legislator, who is understood to be the craftsman who builds the city according to the pattern provided by his view of nature. Thus the poet, who looks to the audience which looks to the legislator, is at the third remove from nature" (Bloom, ibid., p. 432). This means that the poet reinforces the public's attachment to a convention that is merely shadows of nature -- the prisoners' attachment to the shadows on the wall in the cave -- and their distance from the right order of the soul.8 The "virtuous hero" such as Achilles which the poet glorifies to the public is not virtuous at all, but merely a man given to passions (p., 359). The flip side of all this is that "the poet is unable to imitate the best kind of man, the philosopher" (p. 359 - 360) which only the symbolic form of the dialogue succeeds in representing. Summing up the foregoing, we can put Plato's conflict with poetry in the historical context (in the history of order). Voegelin (p. 133): The attack on Homer, in order to be intelligible, must be understood in the context of the "old quarrel" (palaia diaphora) between philosophy and poetry in which it is placed by Plato (607 b). The discoverer of the psyche and its order is at war against the disorder, of which the traditional education through the poets is an important causal factor. The philosopher's Paideia struggles for the soul of man against the Paideia of the myth. In that struggle, as we have seen, the positions changed more than once. The Homeric epic itself, with its free mythopoesis, was a feat of criticism in a situation of civilizational crisis. Hesiod's new truth had its point against the old myth including Homer. For the generation of the mystic philosophers both Homer and Hesiod had moved into the sphere of untruth, to which they opposed the truth of wisdom, of the soul and its depth. Aeschylus created the dramatic myth of the soul, superseding the epic myth in general. For Plato, finally, the tragedy and comedy of the fifth century became as untrue as Homer from whom the chain of Hellenic poetry descended. The discovery of the soul, as well as the struggle for its order, thus, is a process that extends through centuries and passes through more than one phase until it reaches its climax in the soul of Socrates and his impact on Plato. The attack on mimetic poetry from Homer to the time of Socrates pronounces no more than the plain truth that the Age of the Myth is closed. In Socrates the soul of man has at last found itself. After Socrates, no myth is possible. Except, perhaps, the Platonic myth, created through integration of the old form into the new, and functioning only as part of the symbolic form of the dialogue. Thus is outlined the differentiating consciousness' gradual approximation to truth. (Note however that Aeschylus and the mystic philosophers of Presocratic time represent two parallel strands of differentiation proceeding from Hesiod, while Plato's dialogues represent the unification of these two strands.) The reason for Plato's "totalitarianism": the cosmological perspective We have seen that only when the philosopher as king imposes the politeia in his soul on society can the polis come to be in the right order. The philosopher not only forms himself in order in accordance with the order of nature (the law of nature, the idea), but also, when ruling, forms the order of the interior of his fellow citizens and so of the polis, becoming a "craftsman of moderation, justice, and demotic virtue as a whole" (δημιουργον σωφροσύνης τε και δικαιοσύνης και συμπάσης της δημοτικης αρετης; 500 d 6). Plato acquires the most explicit look of a totalitarian when he has Socrates discuss how the imposition or the crafting is to be done. The philosopher needs to take the city and the dispositions (ηθη) of human beings as though they were a tablet, wipe it clean, and start over (501 a 2). For this purpose he should send the whole population over ten years of age (who are no longer impressionable) out of the polis to the country side, and take over the children under ten years of age who can still be molded from afresh. επειτα οιμαι απεργαζόμενοι πυκνα αν εκατέρωσ' αποβλέποιεν, πρός τε το φύσει δίκαιον και καλον και σωφρον και πάντα τα τοιαυτα, και προς εκειν' αυ το εν τοις ανθρώποις εμποιοιεν, συμμειγνύντες τε και κεραννύντες εκ των επιτηδευμάτων το ανδρείκελον, απ' εκείνου τεκμαιρόμενοι, ο δη και Ομηρος εκάλεσεν εν τοις ανθρώποις εγγιγνόμενον θεοειδές τε και θεοείκελον.(501 b) Then I suppose in completing their work they would look away frequently in both directions, toward the just, the beautiful, and the moderate by nature and everything of the sort, and, again, toward what is in human beings; and thus, mixing and blending the practices as ingredients, they would produce the image of man, taking hints from exactly that phenomenon in human beings which Homer too called god-like and the image of god. Also to be practiced is eugenics -- the euthanasia of babies of ill-birth and the breeding of superior babies through the mating of the best at the most appropriate time (i.e. in harmony with the numerological structure of the cosmos). This is the project of the creation of the New Man which the fascists and the communists are to implement two millennia later (most notably, Khmer Rouge). Does Plato provide a justification for these utopian revolutionaries? In regard precisely to this proposal of the banishment of the adults and the taking-over of the young, Voegelin remarks: This would be the surest and quickest way to establish the politeia among a people (514 a). The program is ingenious and eminently practical. We see it followed almost to the letter in our own time when bands of sectarians gain power in a country and begin to reconstruct the people according to their own manners and character by eliminating the older generation from public life and by bringing up the children in the new creed. The program has only one flaw: it cannot be executed by true philosophers. For any attempt to realize the order of the idea by violent means would defeat itself. The authority of the spirit is an authority only if, and when, it is accepted in freedom. Hence, the passage in question is not a Platonic program for political action in the historical environment. Plato is not the speaker; he presents to the reader a report, made by Socrates to an undetermined audience, of a dialogue in the course of which Socrates had made this remark to his partners in conversation. The threefold mediation is the most important element in the meaning of the passage. After the sacrificial death of the historical Socrates, no attempt at direct action will be made. The Socrates-Plato of the dialogue evokes the idea of the right order; those who have ears may listen. The passage has no other function than to show that technically it is not impossible to translate the idea into reality, and to forestall the facile assumption that the Socratic politeia is an impractical daydream. The idea can be realized if the people want to realize it; the philosopher-king is present in their midst, waiting for their consent. Beyond this appeal, however, no attempt either will or can be made to force the consent; if no response is forthcoming, that is the end of political action (ibid., p. 135). Negative though the answer may be, it will be of interest to explore how Plato could have conceived a program so similar to twentieth century totalitarianism.9 Plato's utopian and totalitarian tendency is the result of the compactness of the functional perspective in which he operates, the cosmological form which dictates a microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism, and of which he -- and philosophy in the other two fountain heads, India and China, as well -- never breaks out. The order of society and of Person must be embedded, as replicates of the order of the cosmos, within that cosmos -- this is the underlying reason for the most perfect supraorganism that kallipolis is -- otherwise the society is in disorder and the Person is "unjust". This is the persistance of the compactness that characterizes the cosmological civilizations, of cosmos-gods on one side and human beings-society on the other (save that Plato has replaced gods with ideas). This compactness of microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism also explains Plato's love of numerology. Plato attempts to arrive at a quantitative representation of the "magic politeia", found concentrically from the Person through the polis to the cosmos as their structure: such is the essence of numerology, the ancient equivalent of the mathematical equations contemporary physicists construct to represent the structure of the universe -- which structure, of course, as the ancient microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism has broken down due to the enlargement of experiential horizon on both the macroscopic and microscopic scale and to the differentiation of consciousness, is no longer identical with, or the macroscopic repetition of, the structure of human society or of the human body. But since for Plato it is, the "best polis", in perfect harmony with the cosmos and most harmoniously and efficiently self-working, must coincide in its structure with, that is, embody, the "magic politeia" (the numerological order) isolated for the cosmos as a whole. Human practices, including mating, thus also must follow the numerology that expresses the cosmic rhythm or captures its structure.10 Today this would be like demanding our daily actions to conform to the equations of physics that describe the laws of nature. It is because the best polis -- the ideal polis whose structure (politeia) is laid out in heaven since it recapitulates the structure of the cosmos (heaven) -- would be the perfect embodiment of the magic, numerological politeia that Plato's political project -- the perfecting of a polis -- consists in approximating the earthly temporal polis as much as possible to the ideal numerological (which is musical, as shall be seen) order that is the very structure of the cosmos. (Politics -- the construction of the best polis -- then becomes likened to tuning musical instrument.) The apparent totalitarian character of Plato's politics -- as Ernest G. McClain remarks in The Pythagorean Plato (Nicolas-Hays, York Beach, Maine, 1978) in connection with another instance: "Plato's Athenian [in the Laws] is so determined that everything in Magnesia [the ideal polis therein constructed] will be standardized and regulated that 'no one should dare to sing any unauthorized song, not even if it is sweeter than the hymns of Orpheus or of Thamyras' [829]. It is that unflinching control over every detail in the private lives of citizens which has caused the author of Laws to be labelled a fascist" (p. 99) -- is therefore the consequence of his "tuning" of the polis, his arrangement of the components of the polis into a most harmonious system, most in harmony with the macro-cosmos, i.e. most approximating to the ideal numerological politeia of the cosmos: an attempt at microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism. It is not quite from the same impulse as the revolutionaries of modern totalitarianism. In the modern structural perspective where microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism has disintegrated, Plato's political "tuning" project makes no longer any sense -- already with Aristotle, who has gone through further differentiation of consciousness, it makes no sense. Modern politics, and certainly modern totalitarianism, is not about approximating the structure of human society to that of the universe as revealed by physics. Plato's operating within the compact cosmological mode of the functional perspective also explains -- furnishes the experiential foundation for -- his famed discourse on the decline or degeneration of regimes, from the best, aristocracy (kallipolis), through the bad forms of timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy to the worst form, tyranny. It's possible, as seen, that kallipolis come into being if philosophers should become rulers and mold the citizens in accordance with the politeia he has seen in the transcendental vision of the Agathon. But once come into being, the most perfect order is subject to the operation of entropy-increase -- of the second law -- and will in time disintegrate into disorder, just as, once we have spent effort and arranged all the air molecules in perfect line-up in one corner of the container (low entropy), this perfect line-up will persist but for a fraction of a second and the molecules will thereafter disperse into disorderly random arrangement (low entropy): "since for everything that has come into being there is decay, not even a composition such as this [the aristocratic kallipolis] will remain for all time" (546 a 2). It is simply not as Bloom thinks, that "Socrates, contrary to fact, places the best regime first in order that the quest for wisdom not appear to be in conflict with the political prejudice in favor of the ancestral...", that Socrates puts "what is really the end at the origin" (Bloom, ibid., p. 416). He has not quite grasped the archaism of Plato's perspective. The functional perspective of the cosmological mode would like to apply the second law of thermodynamics to the macroscopic categories of being -- or treat their decay as manifestation of the second law, as if a person's aging and decaying were the same thing as a building's becoming shabby over time, in accordance with the second law -- so that the cosmos is experienced as incessantly degenerating and requiring periodic restoration through sacrifice and ritual, and that the human race itself is experienced as degenerating as time passes, such that the ancestors lived several hundred years during the Golden Age but that the descendants today only briefly. We have seen this in myths around the world, in the Old Testament (Genesis), in Hesiod's myth of the Ages of Man, in Chinese mythology (the legendary ancestors or "emperors"). Plato has not broken through this perspective. "The good polis is not exempt from the cosmic mystery of Being and Becoming. The Form that has been embodied will be disembodied; it is beyond the powers of man to overcome the transitoriness of the flux and to create eternal Being. The eternal Form in Becoming is a fleeting moment between creation and dissolution" (Voegelin, ibid., p. 122 - 3). The perfect order of the polis is maintained through the right relation of subordination among the classes and their minding their respective business, and this is maintained by having the right persons in each class -- especially in the ruling class whose soul is writ large as the polis -- who are supplied by eugenics which produces human beings in accordance with the laws of nature -- to understand the spirit behind Plato's description (in 546 b 5 - d) of the mating of human beings in accordance with the mathematical structure of the cosmic rhythm, we have to imagine contemporary physicists breeding human beings according to the mathematical structure found in the superstring theories. Only then is the polis embedded concentrically within the cosmos as a microcosmic replicate of it. (Plato apparently sees the justification for humans' embeddedness in the cosmos in the way in which plants and animals are in their mating and growth strictly regulated by the seasons as if they were mere parts of the cosmos.) Hence the human polis shall degenerate -- deviate from the politeia of nature -- through the rulers' mating at the wrong time, i.e. slightly not according to the mathematical structure of the cosmos. The offspring will be of lesser quality than the begetting aristocratic philosophers and when they ascend to power they will not be able to maintain the like-mindedness (homonoia) that has hitherto guaranteed the order of kallipolis: "Dissension will arise between those guardians who have brass and iron in their souls and the others who still have gold and silver. The first will be drawn toward money-making and the acquisition of property; the second, desiring only the pure metals in their souls, will be drawn toward virtue and the old customs. In the end they will compromise and agree on private ownership in houses and land; they will enslave the people who formerly lived freely under them, devote themselves to war, and establish their rule by force" (Voegelin, p. 122). The first stage to pass through in this fall is timocracy, a compromise between philosophia and philochrematon which is philotimon, the type of man ruling this city, devoted to making war. Because of the microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism (the "anthropological principle"), i.e. because the polis is the (predominant man's) soul writ large, the description of the degeneration of aristocracy to timocracy and from then onward, as mentioned above, is accompanied by that of the degradation of the aristocratic man's son to timocratic and from then onward. The aristocratic man's son sees his father being disrespected by his wife, servants, and fellow citizens and the multi-practicing busy-bodies being honored in public, his logistikon and epithymetikon compromise in the middle, in the spirited part, and he becomes honor-loving. As the appearance and ascendance of private property in timocracy continues and pulls the polis downward to oligarchy, where the wealthy are installed as rulers and the rest become increasingly impoverished, the timocratic, honor-loving man's son sees his father foundering in the city and losing his property and decides to devote himself to money-making as defense against a similar fate: the constitution of the money-making in whom philochrematon predominates. The symptom of the degenerate city is its gradual loss of homonoia or unity and the ability to defend itself. From now on, "bodily life... becomes dominant" (Bloom, p. 420). The polis is good when the logistikon predominates in the souls of the rulers; it is a timocracy when the philonikon predominates; an oligarchy when the passions of the epithymetikon and philochrematon predominates. In order to derive the further forms of democracy and tyranny, Plato subdivides the passions (epithymia) into the necessary and wholesome, the unnecessary and luxurious, and the criminal ones (558 c - 559 d). In the oligarchy, the necessary desires which induce a restrictive, parsimonious, miserly life predominates. [This corresponds in modern time to the production phase of capitalism: the oligarchic man is like the capitalist of "Protestant Ethic", making a lot of money but unwilling to spend it for enjoyment.] In the democracy the unnecessary passions which lead to insolence, anarchy, waste, and impudence are let loose. [This is the consumption phase of capitalism: consumerism.] In the despotic soul this pluralistic field of passions is dominated by a champion lust of a criminal nature which induces men to translate into reality the desires which they experience in dreams [i.e. the id un-inhibited]. (Voegelin, p. 125.) Oligarchy degenerates to democracy when factions in it end with the poor killing off and exiling the rich and establishing equality between the ruler and ruled. Plato evaluates democracy with its abundance of freedom negatively because he sees as disorder the equality that prevails in it between parents and children, teachers and students, animals and human beings. The democratic man is constituted from the oligarchic man when with outside influence the wasteful desires in him banish the moderate desires. The birth of tyranny and the tyrant from democracy -- when, roughly, the potential tyrant rises up as the defender of commoners against the rich, robs the rich, and re-distribute the wealth among commoners, keeping a large share for himself -- seems to describe many of the modern revolutions, such as Mao's communist revolution. Degeneration has now been completed. To note is the continuous factions within the individual and the city which cause the degradation to the grade below. Characters and forms do not simply correspond to each other but the various social forces (father, mother, servants, friends, acquaintances and so on) struggle in the soul of the individual; and they can struggle within the individual soul because they are psychic forces. The psyche is a society of forces, and society is the differentiated manifold of psychic elements. The forms can follow each other intelligibly in time because their sequence as a whole is a process within a soul, that is, the process of gradual corrosion in which the elements of the psyche are one after the other loosened from their "just" position in the integrated, well-ordered soul, until the passions without a higher ordering principle range freely without restraint. (Voegelin, p. 125.) This decomposition of the soul is characterized by the degeneration of the concern with nourishing the philosophic soul to that with nourishing the philochrematic body. The break-up of communism and the appearance of private property and family during the fall to timocracy mark the beginning of this degradation of concern because, as Bloom rightly notes, private property and the family are extension of the body (p. 387) and exist for the fulfillment of its needs. To come back to the problem of the philosopher-ruler. The purpose of Gorgias is the same as, but milder than, that of the Republic. In the end of this dialogue Plato advances the ideal of the statesman -- the statesman true to his eidos, or "rectified in name", to use Confucius' words -- as the one who can make the citizens better (i.e. more orderly) in soul and so juster in action, just as a physician or a fitness trainer makes his client better in body. This is the same as the purpose of the philosopher-king in imposing right order on the souls of its fellow citizens; but it is "milder" in the sense that, in the Gorgias, the better order is not explicitly specified as the embodiment of the Agathon or the microcosmic version of the structure of the cosmos. The statesmen of the day, the sophistic type, on the other hand, try only to gratify the citizens' lower desires, with sweet words they like to hear and with booty to distribute among them, "stuffing the city with harbors and arsenals and walls and tribute and suchlike trash" (G. 519) and making them worse (more disorderly) in soul, in fact, just as today's politicians in a democracy are most concerned with the "economy" (the plentiful supply of consumer products in people's life) in order to gratify their constituencies' bodily desires. Plato had never succeeded in introducing the true statesman or the philosopher-king into the polis -- his project of the salvation of the Athenian polis was a failure. After the Republic, in the Phaedrus, Plato was "resigned to the fact that the polis had rejected his appeals" (Voegelin, p. 139) and retreated in his concern to the order of the personal soul that was not to be "macrocosmicized" into the whole of human community. "He had returned from return to the cave." That is, the hope of an ethnic or national theocracy is abandoned. In its stead, the "theocratic" soul in the Person is universalized: the seeking-out of persons from whichever polis or ethnic group who can be likewise enlightened (brought out of the cave) and the founding of a spiritual community with them, which is thus "in" the historical polis but not "of" it. This is the Academy, the sect. There is now the communal embodiment of the Agathon, but not through the polis. "In the community of the erotically philosophizing companions Plato has found the realm of the Idea; and insofar as, in the Academy, he is the founder of such a company, he has, indeed, embodied the Idea in the reality of a community" (Voegelin, p. 137). The spirit has now migrated away from the polis (p. 139). (Though the Academy was founded at the time of the composition of the Gorgias and the Republic, after the last attempt is made with the Republic to appeal to the historical citizens of the polis, Plato concentrated his "theocratic energy" in the operation of the Academy.) The retreat of the enlightened spiritual master into a sect not of this world after his failure to macrocosmicize his spirituality into an ethnic or national theocracy is a frequent occurrence in the spiritual history of humanity. We can name the Israelite prophets vis-à-vis their kingdom of Judah which refused to conform to their monotheistic Yahwism, Paul vis-à-vis his Jewish community which refused to accept his Jesus, or Confucius vis-à-vis the middle-kingdoms which refused to practice the rectification of names (although after their death the national theocracy that they advocated all came about: orthodox Judaism which has persisted to this day, the Latin Christendom that continued to the time of Reformation, and the Confucian government that ruled China for two millennia; only Plato's Politeia has never become reality in history). This disjuncture between the spiritual and the material strand of history refers to a "stratification of human consciousness", where the consciousness of the rest of humanity no longer differentiates and/or integrates at the same pace as the philosopher's (or the prophet's), as we have seen Voegelin mention it earlier.11 Plato should therefore not be considered to figure in the "history of order" as conceived by Voegelin. Plato's politeia or "anthropologic mode" (a modified cosmological mode, ordered from the transcendent above rather than from within) has never been adopted as an ordering principle in the material history of humankind. Unlike the others mentioned: the Latin church has in particular legislated in history (in regard to marriage and sexual conduct, for example) in order to induce right order (the salvational state) in the souls of the governed, just as Plato thinks good statesmen should do. The order that succeeded the cosmological empire and Homeric polis was therefore rather sophism and then the multi-civilizational empire of Alexander and Rome, which was in turn succeeded by the Latin and Byzantine Christendom. The break-up of Plato's cosmological perspective: further differentiation by Aristotle Further differentiation in consciousness would break apart the compact cosmological mode within which Plato operates and thus destroy the Platonic sentiment that the best city is the most orderly city and, as such, is the most ordered soul writ large -- who is the cosmos writ small. One possible cause of differentiation would be falsification by empirical reality, as for example when the communistic totalitarian community, once come into being through the artificial effort Plato has described, turns out to be not so orderly and the source of immense human misery (such as in the case of the communist revolution in Cambodia). Seeing this, consciousness would differentiate and no longer see as the good and only good order the embedding of Person and society within the order of the cosmos. On the other hand, differentiation could occur of its own accord. The differentiation of consciousness happens with Aristotle. He can no longer understand Plato's compact cosmological mode. A clear instance of this is his decomposition of the numerological order which expresses quantitatively for Plato the theocratic compactification of nature and human through the common politeia. For example, Aristotle's criticism of Plato's suggestion in the Laws as to the size of the polis: Aristotle is of the opinion that 5,000 citizens would be too large a number for a well-ordered polis. If so many persons are to be supported in idleness as a ruling class, the polis would have to have a territory as large as Babylon (Politics 1265 a10 - 18). The decisive point is that Aristotle gives the number as 5,000 while Plato has 5,040. The number 5,040 was chosen by Plato because of its cosmological relations and it cannot be changed to 5,039 or 5,041 without destroying the musical and zodiacal implications of the numerical symbolism. That, however, is precisely what Aristotle does. He destroys the Platonic play with cosmic numbers; he divests the figure of its symbolic meaning and treats it as a statistical population figure. The population of the polis is the "topic"; the figure must be investigated under its practical aspects; and, hence, it does not matter whether one takes the "round" figure 5,000 instead of the symbolically exact figure 5,040. (Voegelin, ibid., p. 293) The cosmos and humans have become dissociated from each other for Aristotle's more differentiated perspective, so that the human world, orderly though it be, need not thereby replicate the order of the cosmos (the laws of nature), but can be investigated, formed, and reformed independent of the latter, in accordance only with empirical practicality and feasibility ("Will this politeia work?"). It is likely that the changing historical epoch (the coming of the Age of Empire under Alexander) had played a role in differentiating Aristotle's experience. In any case, because of this differentiation, for Aristotle the best polis (the construction of which is the goal of politics) is no longer to be that perfect supraorganism Plato conceives in which the happiness of all individuals, of whichever class, is subordinated to the orderly and efficient functioning of the whole (the real meaning of supraorganismic eudaimonia), but rather that realistic polis in which individual human beings -- or at least the philosopher-rulers among them -- have the best chance of actualizing their potential to the fullest, i.e. to the point of bios theoretikos or a life of philosophic contemplation ("... an organizational framework for the maximal actualization of human excellence (at least for those men who can actualize it at all"; Voegelin, p. 353). When Alan Bloom in his interpretive essay speaks of the function of the legislator as crafting an environment in which the good life becomes possible, he is speaking from the Aristotelian perspective, not from the Platonic. (When Plato speaks of the function of the ruler as crafting justice in the soul of the citizens, he has in mind the concentric view that the most orderly states of the souls of citizens will accumulate into the most orderly and efficient supraorganismic functioning: hence the emphasis on justice as "own business-minding".) There is a fundamental difference between Plato and Aristotle in regard to the raison d'être of the best polis. The differentiation of consciousness which Aristotle experiences leads both to his (though still restrained; Voegelin, p. 277) derailed interpretation of Plato's metaphysics (what Voegelin refers to as "the transformation of symbols developed for articulating the philosopher's experience of transcendence into topics of speculation"; ibid.) such as seen in the example above, and to his own immanent metaphysics: i.e. his four causes in Book IV of Metaphysics that are meant to replace Plato's forms: (1) the material cause: εξ ου γίγνεταί τι ενυπάρχοντος οιον ο χαλδος του ανδριάντος και ο άργυρος της φιάλης, "the material out of which something comes to be, as for example bronze [is the cause or material] of statue and silver of bowl..."; (2) the formal cause: ειδος και το παράδειγμα, the "form or pattern" of something, "what something is to be" (του τί ην ειναι); (3) the efficient cause: όθεν η αρχη της μεταβολης η πρωτη η της ηρεμήσεως, "that from which the first origin of change or of rest [proceeds]"; οιον ο βουλεύσας αίτιος, και ο πατηρ του τέκνου "as for instance the one who planned [something is] its cause or as a father is the cause of his child"; (4) the final cause: το τελος, το ου ένεκα, "that for the sake of which": οιον του περιπατειν η υγίεια, "for example, health is the cause for walking", as when we walk for the sake of being healthy.12 As Voegelin explains the cause for Aristotle's immanentization: The assumption of forms in separate existence raised the question how the separate forms could be the forms of empirical reality. The Platonic answer that the flux of becoming has being insofar as it participates in the Idea, or insofar as the Idea is embodied in it, only led to further questions concerning the meaning of participation. Aristotle abolished these problems by abolishing the assumption of separate forms as an unnecessary duplication. The form is perceived as such in reality through a function of the mind, through noesis. There is no essential being except the essences which we discern as such in the stream of reality; and they do not enter becoming from a transcendental realm of being, but essence begets essence in the infinite, uncreated stream of reality itself. At one stroke we are rid of the realm of paradigmatic ideas, of speculations on the possibility that ideas are numbers of one kind or another, of methexis, of embodiment, of the creation of the world, of the demiurge, and so forth. [The latter are the problems which occupy Plato in the Timaeus.] And as far as the history of philosophy on the doxographic level is concerned, we now have a clear opposition between Platonic transcendentalism and idealism on the one side, and Aristotelian immanentism and realism on the other side (p. 274). Although we have interpreted Plato's "forms" or "ideas" as the equivalents in the functional, cosmological perspective to the laws of nature governing immanent existence in the structural perspective, we are not forgetting that Plato did not "discover" these laws under a disinterested attitude during the robotic routines of (modern) "research", but "saw" them in the "spiritual passion of the soul" which re-formed its order: In the passion of faith the ground of being is experienced, and that means the ground of all being, including immanent form. Hence, it is legitimate to symbolize the ground of being through immaterial forms, like the Platonic Idea (Voegelin, p. 275). When we encourage the doing of physics in the philosophical way so as to transform it into an instrument, or path toward, salvation -- in contradistinction to the robotic, unsentimental routine of research and professionalism in universities -- we are in effect prompting the students of physics and natural sciences to regain for the "laws" they learn and discover this symbolizing function which re-forms their consciousness and attitude toward life and nature. "Wonder", as described by Roger Penrose for the young woman gazing up into the night sky in the Epilogue of his The Road to Reality, is the first step. But Aristotle, with his concentration on "explaining" the immanent -- somewhat like the typical scientist of contemporary times -- has lost most of this religiosity of Plato's. Along with the transcendental realm of ideas, he has also rid us of the "spiritual passion" which constitutes philosophia as a salvational pursuit. The consequence is a curious transformation of the experience of transcendence which can perhaps be described as an intellectual thinning-out. The fullness of experience which Plato expressed in the richness of his myth is in Aristotle reduced to the conception of God as the prime mover, as the noesis noeseos, the "thinking on thinking" [Metaphysics XII]. The Eros toward the Agathon correspondingly is reduced to the agapesis [Metaphysics I], the delight in cognitive action for its own sake. Moreover, no longer is the soul as a whole immortal but only that part in it which Aristotle calls active intellect; the passive intellect, including memory, perishes [De Anima III]. And, finally, the mystical via negativa by which the soul ascends to the vision of the Idea in the Symposium is thinned out to the rise toward the dianoetic virtues and the bios theoretikos [Politics VII] (Voegelin, p. 275). Consequently, empirical happiness in this life (the contracted sense of eudaimonia, and not beatitude) is all that is left in Aristotle's ethics and political science. Aristotle thus marks the end of the Hellenic tradition of salvation (in the second mode). However, the break-up of the cosmological perspective is also what enables Aristotle to seriously examine the communistic aspects of Plato's kallipolis in terms of practicality and criticize it in just the manner in which, in our times, (paleo-)conservatives criticize the radical programs of the revolutionaries, whether of the right or of the left. "When the normal relations between men and women, parents and children, are interrupted through a communal organization of sex relations, then the human qualities which ordinarily are invested in such relations have no range of actualization." Obliterated is especially the possibility of philia, or friendship, which for Aristotle is the foundation of a polis. "The concreteness of personal relations will disappear and the very substance of community life will evaporate" (Voegelin, p. 321 - 2). No polis at all. On the other hand, the restoration of the family and private property for the sake of the polis -- insofar as these are as Bloom emphasizes extensions of the body -- has just the other aspect of care of the needs of the body which, as seen, Aristotle has not forgotten even in the case of the philosopher. The differentiation of consciousness thus not simply causes Aristotle, on the bad side, to lose salvational concern, but also enables him, on the good side, to provide a realistic model both of human happiness and of the polis: hence true political science starts with Aristotle, but we will not deal with it in our genealogy of the human salvational tradition. Footnotes 1. Plato's Symposium, translation by Seth Benardete with Commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete; Greek text in Loeb 166, Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, with translation by Lamb. In Symposium Plato has Socrates recount the encounter he has had during his youth with a certain goddess by the name of Diotima, who taught him the truth about Eros. As said, it is only here that Eros is revealed in its full form. Diotima teaches that "the mortal nature ever seeks as much as possible to be immortal" (η θνητη φύσις ζητει κατα το δυνατον αει το ειναι αθάνατος; 207 d). All human beings are in love with the immortal (του γαρ αθανάτον ερωσιν; 208 e 2). That is, inherent in human nature is the yearning for salvation, for the negation of finitude, even if in the beginning this yearning is only obscurely felt and inadequately satisfied. Eros is the drive in human beings toward salvation. And they try to ensure immortality for themselves through begetting, leaving behind a new creature in place of the old (ότι αει καταλείπει έτερον νέον αντι του παλαιου; 207 d 3). This is the pre-philosophical way, the common means before the discovery of salvational pursuit, and it is a sorrowful half-way measure, the attainment of a truncated immortality or godliness. Within this pre-philosophical way, several phases can be distinguished. At the most basic, lowest stage, the commoners in whom the body with its desires reigns supreme or is the only thing noticeable -- those who are pregnant in body (οι εγκύμονες κατα σώματα όντες) -- go after women to beget children. This is the most basic expression of Eros, when the instinct for salvation comes only dimly in view and its satisfaction is most inadequate, through a mere indefinite continuation of lineage. This is even before pre-salvation as the indefinite continuation of one's own life. Those who have developed beyond the concern with and consciousness of the body are "pregnant in soul" (εγκύμονες κατα την ψυχήν), i.e. their bodily desires have been "sublimated", as we say today, and they are pregnant with prudence (phronesin) and virtues in general and, to give birth to these, they become poets and inventors (ευρετικοι) and, finally, statesmen. Within this phase should perhaps also be included the heroes who die for an immortal fame. In the next phase of development we find the itinerant teacher like Socrates, whose soul "is so far divine that it is made pregnant with [virtues] from his youth" (τούτων αυ... τις εκ νέου εγκύμων ηι την ψυχην θειος; 209 b). This is the person whose desires are most sublimated, who goes around in search of other beautiful souls that can be educated; and when he finds them he educates them and lets them grow into virtuous souls so as to give birth to what is inside him. Such products of education are superior to the products of sexual intercourse (children) because they are more "beautiful and immortal" (καλλιόνων και αθανατωτέρων; 207 c 7). Within this third phase are included all the great educators such as Homer and Hesiod, Lycurgus and Solon. Now we see that beauty is a function of the drive toward immortality or salvation: the commoner of the level of the body is attracted to beautiful bodies, and the further developed is attracted to the beauty of other's soul ("inner beauty") and of abstract entities of virtues such as laws, customs, and pursuits. Further development or sublimation also consists of differentiation of the beautiful things and consequent attraction to not the beauty of this or that but beauty itself, the form of the beautiful. The person has now entered the realm of knowledge (episteme), the realm of philosophy. Sublimation has here ascended to the highest level possible, to the final object of Eros, the beautiful itself: the beautiful not as manifested in particular things, but by itself, ever be-ing, neither coming to be nor perishing, neither increasing nor waning; nor is it such at such time and other at another, nor in one respect beautiful and in another ugly, nor here beautiful but there ugly, such as being beautiful to some and ugly to others (αει ον και ούτε γιγνόμενον ούτε απολλύμενον, ούτε αυξανόμενον ούτε φθινον, έπειτα ου τηι μεν καλόν, τηι δ' αισχρόν, ουδε τοτε μέν, τοτε δ' ού, ουδε προς μεν το καλόν, προς δε το αισχρόν, ουδ' ένθα μεν καλόν, ένθα δε αισχρόν, ως τισι μεν ον καλόν, τισι δε αισχρόν; 211). The form of the beautiful is at once the form of the Good. This moment is the vision of salvation, the highest peak of Maslow's peak experience. Only here is the method of immortalization through leaving offspring behind abandoned. What Diotima has described is the hierarchical process of sublimation in which one comes closer and closer to the truth of beauty: αρχόμενον απο τωνδε των καλων εκείνου ένεκα του καλου αει επανιέναι, ώσπερ επαναβαθμοις χρώμενον, απο ενος επι δύο και απο δυοιν επι πάντα τα καλα σώματα, και απο των καλων σωμάτων επι τα καλα επιτηδεύματα, και απο των επιτηδευμάτων επι τα καλα μαθήματα, και απο των μαθημάτων επ' εκεινο το μάθημα τελευτησαι, ό εστιν ουκ άλλου η αυτου εκείνου του καλου μάθημα, ίνα γνωι αυτο τελευτων ο έστι καλόν (211 c) Starting from the beauties he must for the sake of that beautiful be ever climbing aloft, as if utilizing a ladder, from one to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful pursuits, and from pursuits to beautiful objects of knowledge, and from the objects of knowledge he finishes at that beautiful learning which is the learning of nothing other than the beautiful itself, in order that he may know, having completed [the journey], what is beautiful [i.e. the form of the beautiful]. Note that a philosopher such as Socrates combines in himself both the philosophical way (the vision of the beautiful itself) and the pre-philosophical way of salvation (begetting beautiful souls in the potentially teachable young). Furthermore, it is because philosophical learning is the highest sublimation of bodily Eros that those with the greatest desire for philosophy are also the ones with the greatest potential for tyranny, that the philosopher is in essence the sublimation of the tyrant. 2. Eric Brown, in an rather ordinary understanding of Plato ("Plato's Ethics and Politics in The Republic" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), has reduced Plato's first argument (the argument of the order of the soul) to just this: the philosopher is happier because his pleasures are more secure. This is a complete misunderstanding of the first argument. His presentation of it runs: "Socrates and Glaucon characterize the person ruled by his lawless attitudes as enslaved, as least able to do what it wants, as full of disorder and regret, as poor and unsatisfiable, and as fearful (577c-578a). These characterizations fit in a logical order. The tyrannical soul wants satisfactions that depend upon external circumstances; in this way it is enslaved. Insofar as the tyrannical soul is most filled with never-ending desires that cannot all be satisfied and most filled with outsized desires for more than can be satisfied, then the tyrannical soul is least able to do what it wants. These initial difficulties give rise to the rest. The tyrant is full of disorder and regret by virtue of not having been able to do what he wants, is poor and unsatisfiable by virtue of now being unable to do what he wants, and is fearful by virtue of perceiving future inability to do what he wants. The result is a miserable existence, and the misery is rooted in attitudes that demand more satisfaction than a person can achieve. The tyrant does not have the capacity to do what he wants to do. Contrast the philosophical soul. The philosopher is most able to do what she chooses to do, for she chooses to do what is best, and as long as one has agency, there would seem to be a doable best. (Should circumstances make a certain apparent best undoable, then it will no longer be best.) It might even seem that the philosopher's capacity to do what is best guarantees her success. But this pushes the interpretation too far. First, we should not suppose that what is best is always available. Socrates is quite clear that some appetitive attitudes are necessary, and one can well imagine circumstances of extreme deprivation in which the necessary appetitive attitudes (for food or drink, say) are unsatisfiable. Second, the capacity to do what is best may well require engaging in certain kinds of activities in order to maintain itself. Even if the philosopher can satisfy her necessary appetitive attitudes, she may be prevented by unfortunate circumstances from the sorts of regular thought and action that are required to hold onto the capacity to do what is best. These considerations suggest that a virtuous soul does not guarantee the capacity to do what one wants. Even if the philosophical soul is easily the most able to do what it chooses, and the closest thing to a sure bet for this capacity, it does not by itself guarantee the capacity. This comparison between the tyrannical soul and the philosophical soul does all the work that Socrates needs if the capacity to do what one wants correlates closely with human flourishing and if the lessons about the tyrant's incapacity generalize to the other defective psychological constitutions. Start with the second point. A person who seeks honor or money above all might be fortunate enough to find himself in circumstances in which he regularly has the capacity to do as he chooses. But the capacity would not be fully his. It would depend in deep and obvious ways upon a cooperative environment that nurtures him and provides an orderly context in which he can do what he values as honorable or as lucrative. As long as that environment is secure, he will not be racked by regret, or frustration, or fear. He will be able to do what he chooses to do.... This contrast must not be undersold, for it is plausible to think that the self-sufficiency of the philosopher makes him more flourishing. Appropriately ruled non-philosophers can enjoy a kind of happiness only so long as their circumstances are appropriately ruled, and this makes their happiness far less stable than what the philosophers enjoy. Things in the world tend to change, and the philosopher is in a much better position to flourish through these changes.... Nevertheless, so far as this argument shows, the happiness of appropriately ruled non-philosophers is just as real as the happiness of philosophers. This argument understands happiness in terms of the capacity to do what one wants to do, to realize what seems best to one, and it seems that exceptionally well-trained persons in exceptionally well-ordered cities can be happy whether they are pursuing what is honorable or the objects of necessary appetitive attitudes or what is known to be really good." According to the first argument, the philosopher is happier not because he is most able to do what he chooses or is best for him -- though this is true -- but because what he does puts his interior in order. 3. Eric Brown this time has successfully grasped this version of Plato's third argument. "We can readily recognize the contrast between pleasures that fill a lack and thereby replace a pain (these are not genuine pleasures) and pleasures that do not fill a lack and thereby replace a pain (these are genuine pleasures). [Then the argument aims] to establish that most bodily pleasures -- and the most intense of these -- fill a painful lack and are not genuine pleasures. Finally, Socrates takes his third step by arguing that the philosopher's pleasures do not fill a painful lack and are genuine pleasures. Contra the epicure's assumption, the philosopher's pleasures are more substantial than the pleasures of the flesh." 4. Note that Eric Brown has distinguished a different set of five arguments. But we believe that he is confused and mistaken in his identification of the arguments. 5. The Loeb Classical Library, with translator H. Rackham. 6. "A tyrant is removed from true pleasure by a number that is 3 x 3" (587 d 3: τριπλασίου άρα... τριπλάσιον αριθμωι αληθους ηδονης αφέστηκεν τύραννος) The numerology is supposed to reflect the structure of the cosmos in which the five types are embedded. See footnote 10. 1 - aristocrat 2 - timocrat 3 - oligarch - 1 | 1 democrat - 2 | tyrant - 3 v 729 times 7. We will discuss later on the contrast between Plato with his functional perspective for whom even the intelligibility of human-made objects figures as part of the objective reality of the universe, and Heidegger with his structural perspective for whom even the intelligibility of natural objects is the result of humans' subjective disclosing in accordance with their self-interpretation. 8. We leave aside Bloom's Straussian concern that the poet rather tells the truth that should be suppressed in a well-ordered polis, making publicly known the lamentation of heroes that they keep hidden in private. "The legislator taught that nobility and happiness are one; the poets separate the two and reveal the truth" (Bloom, p. 433). 9. The charge of totalitarianism is famously advanced by Karl Popper in The Open Society and It Enemies. Keeping in mind our supraorganismic definition of "totalitarianism" (modelled on multicellularity), consult Eric Brown's "ordinary view" on the matter again, 4. 4. "Totalitarianism", and its accompanying bibliography. 10. We may invoke the aforementioned distance between the "quantity" of pleasure in aristocratic man's life and that in tyrannic man's life as an illustration of how for Plato the human realm embodies and replicates concentrically the cosmic structure. The five types of man constitute an anthropological classification that represents the structure of the total field of human possibilities in terms of order and disorder, from the most orderly, the most right, to the most disorderly, the most wrong, and this structure is identical with that of the macro-cosmos. Both structures are represented by a geometrical figure -- much as a set of equations i.e. numerical formulae, in a grand unified theory (of superstrings or whatever), today describes the origin and evolution of the universe, save that it does not describe at the same time the total field or structure of humanity. If the distance between the tyrannic man and the aristocratic man in terms of order-pleasure is 3 x 3, it is a line of 9 that is paradoxically called a plane because it is a number formed of two elements (3 x 3) which could represent length and width. "The phantom of tyrannic pleasures would, on the basis of the number of its length, be a plane" (επίπεδον; 587 d 6). "Then 'the plane line' is squared and cubed and results in a solid, the number of which is 729", i.e. 9 x 9 x 9 (Bloom, p. 470). Bloom notes further that the Pythagorean Philolaus has calculated the days of a year to be 364.5. "If there are a similar number of nights, the number would be 729" (ibid.). Thus Plato comments, "the number [quantifying the relative misery of the tyrant] is true, and appropriate to lives too, if days and nights and months and years are appropriate to them [i.e. to the lives]" (588 a 2; και μέντοι και αληθη και προσήκοντά γε... βίοις αριθμόν, είπερ αυτοις προσήκουσιν ημέραι και νύκτες και μηνες και ενιαυτοί). The cube thus concentrically represents exactly both the structure of the cosmos drawn out in one of its cycle and the structure of human variations (or of humanity in short) drawn out in one cycle. (The degeneration of the aristocratic down to the tyrannic constitutes one cycle that encompasses all possible types of human being, and the seasons, months, day and night together constitute all the variations in which the cosmos manifests itself.) 11. 12. Loeb Classical Library, Metaphysics, Books 1 - 9, with translation by Hugh Tredennick. A good English translation is Aristotle: Metaphysics, Books G, D, and E, translation with notes by Christopher Kirwan, 2nd ed, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. See p. 124 - 5 for the variant versions of the "theory of causes" in others of Aristotle's works. See also Daniel Guerrière's "On Causes" for a good analysis of Aristotle's four causes. previous section | Table of Content | next section