On Platonic Idealism
Deeply inspired by Socrates, his teacher, Plato gave his life's work to the examination and proliferation of the Socratic ideals of goodness, truth, justice, and freedom.[i] We have him to thank for all the dialogues that recount the teachings of Socrates.
Plato’s idealism has been much misunderstood throughout the ages,[ii] but there is no mistaking the spirit with which he went about, on Socrates' advice, questioning the assumptions that others are want to take for granted, and proliferating the ideals of human perfectibility which he and Socrates shared, despite the mediocrity which was, and is, the norm.
Though Plato and many like him have been called dreamers by histories more fanatic realists, and are said to have lacked practical efficacy simply because no government has yet been erected in the explicit form of his ideal republic, I think, that the spirit of Plato's philosopher king has been alive and exercising its power throughout history through a dynamic of emergent power in every field, including, as we shall see, science and education. No power structure is explicitly Platonic because power, for Plato, did not mean structure, but influence, and politics for him meant the interactive influence of persons on one another--such as the influence that courageous idealists like him have had on those of us who learn from, emulate, and remember them.
"By concentration on this point of view and its implications Greek thought and art achieved a clarity never equaled elsewhere and Plato became its supreme spokesman."[iii]
"[T]he Academy had a continuous life of nine hundred years, a longer life span than that of any other educational institution in the West. This is scarcely the portrait of an armchair philosopher spinning theories in a study lined with books from floor to ceiling."[iv]
Thus, despite a lack of direct influence, Plato was hardly impotent. We have reason to take such idealism as his seriously when we consider the indirect influence that such great teachers have had on the course of history simply by raising the standards of all human enterprises, from family and friendship to institutions of state and science. The "intense interest in the correction of social and political abuses,"[v] that these visionaries shared has inspired more historical goals, choices, and decisions than we can ever know.
Both classical and romantic trends are movements in the name of 'human values' against the extremes of both government and individual rule. The difference between them is always in how 'human values' are defined, and the dynamic itself is a function of our apparently necessary inability to settle on just what these values ought to be. This is not a bad thing. It is good, I think, that the question remains--despite those who have long since answered it--What is the good for humans? And, as we shall see through the work of more contemporary idealists, the answer is still as the oracle's dictum proclaimed, to "Know thyself." The lesson to be learned is that we must learn the lesson, individually. That is, we must continue to inquire in order to answer the question for ourselves. There are no simple once-and-for-all answers, only simple and universal principles that need to be applied to infinitely complex particulars.
Whereas Plato wrote while Socrates spoke to his audience, their method for making idealism realistic--in Aristotle's favorite sense, i.e. practical--is the same and in keeping with the oracles advice:
"At the heart ... of the doctrine was the insistence upon the supreme duty of 'tending the soul' and making it as perfect as possible. By this Plato meant that it is man's obligation to know, to grasp the meaning of the world rationally, and to manage his conduct in accordance with that insight." [vi]
There are many great teachers who have contributed immeasurably to this cause through their words and their sacrifices. These and most of the courageous idealists who have advanced human perfectibility have done so, as Socrates and Plato made clear, through the method of dialogue:
"[Plato] believed as a philosopher that the world is pervaded by Reason, and that its beauty is an outward manifestation of its ultimate nature. The dialogue form permitted him to lead men to this insight... The dialogue therefore is the dialectic, a skillfully directed technique of questioning. For this reason he described the dialectician as the midwife tending us in the act, in the ‘labor,’ of knowing. To change the metaphor, the dialectician is like the gardener who aids his plants but is unable to do for them what they must do themselves. ... Its effectiveness lies in the effort it demands on the part of the participants, and its achievement, as in the case of the plant, is fulfillment. In fact, the essence of Platonism may be said to be the realization that we can and must know, not by trial and error, which teaches too late, if indeed it teaches much at all, but by coming to see what is possible, and what is not possible, in the world in which we live."[vii]
Here in the late twentieth-century streets and squares of Athens, men still spend their days gathered with their own, discussing--what?--their families, their shops, their lost hopes, their new dreams. One tells me he dreams of coming to America...like I have long dreamed of coming to Greece. A shop keeper tells my companion and I about his daughter's wedding and his beautiful grandchildren. A young man, a student, gives us directions and asks with a smile and a full pack hanging out of his pocket, if we have a cigarette. Human beings in all places and all times have found it perhaps the favorite of all past times--talking to one another. We do not talk any less that the ancients did...but some of us seem to have forgotten what they were talking about. Happily, others of us have not.
[i][edited into body] Plato is criticized for what looks like an acceptance of inequalities, but as Cairns points out, "In Plato's hands aristocracy meant the rule of the best, from whatever class they came. The able were to receive special training for the responsibilities requiring great ability; the less able were to perform the tasks suitable to their ability. Plato's political theory is an implication of the system of nature, and to call this philosophy aristocratic is meaningful only in the sense that nature is itself aristocratic. But to call any philosophy aristocratic in the sense of class interest is meaningless; preoccupation with the interests of one class to the detriment of others is not philosophy. Philosophy is disinterested or it is not philosophy. When ideas are manipulated for personal ends, for class or group interests, the name for this in Plato's day was sophistry. It was against this that all the dialogues were directed. To accuse Plato of being in league with the sophistic forces that undermined the classical world is an instance of the more subtle misrepresentation of his position." (Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xvi)
[ii]As Berkeley's argument for idealism illustrates, (that "...in the end, all we can know about the objective world are ideas existing in the mind.(Treatise: p 24) "...extension, figure and motion are only ideas existing in the mind ... the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind."(Treatise: p.26-27) some kinds of idealism seem at first to reduce reality to knowledge, and knowledge to perception -- but direct understanding of ideas is no matter to be undervalued. As I understand it, sensory content is understood in this form of idealism as the flowing images of consciousness, experiencing reality directly, primarily, and using words only to connect by association our meaningful images with those of others. The capacity of mind that is language allows reference and the possibility of communication that allows for the intelligent use of words. But it is thoughts which give reason to words to begin with. To be an idealist with regard to these matters does not require throwing out objective reality, for thoughts are objectively real nonarbitrary images -- they just aren't physical and concrete objects. Here, as for Locke, thoughts = ideas, which are objectively real, just not objects in and of themselves; rather, they require subjective interpretation and arbitrary word association to establish the connections of communication with others. Ideas, or thoughts, or concepts, or notions, for Berkeley, are independently real, perceivable whether we know the words for them or not. Whereas words, by their power to refer, are the subjective inventions we use to communicate ideas. While truth, by Locke, means correspondence between ideas and objects, for Berkeley truth is correspondence between ideas and words. And "we need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge."(Bishop Berekley, Treatise p. 22.)
Cairns says this about Plato's attitude about that: "[T]he information we derive from our senses varies with conditions. ... What our senses report about objects is not wholly responsible and must be corrected by intelligence. ... In Platonism order is not the sum of the laws that science discovers but the principle of all laws, the logos or Intelligence itself. Plato approached this problem on the assumption that when we classify things under a general name we do so because permanence and order are there."(Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xviii) "He has no doubt that the Ideas exist outside the human mind, and shows that by turning our attention to ultimate problems we attain knowledge, for our intelligence, like the eye, beholds that toward which it is turned; if we do not look we do not see."(Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xix)
Berkeley exhibits this other kind of idealism too--that is, idealism as belief in human goodness--by calling for a new understanding of the universal human being, which, rather than an abstracted stereotype taken from particular individuals known from direct experience being used to generalize over "man in general", is a concept of human being which does not limit our becoming. Since it required only "mental manufacturing" to begin with, it needs only mental reformulation to change. It is an idea that was invented and is amendable by "men" (too obviously) or, at any rate, people. Our idea of personhood needs reevaluation, toward retaining only what is common to all -- the essence, or principle of humanness -- in order to see the potential that human beings still have. (Bishop Berekley, Treatise p.22)
[iii](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xiii)
[iv](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xiii)
[v](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xiv)
[vi](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xx-xxi)
[vii](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xiv-xv)
Deeply inspired by Socrates, his teacher, Plato gave his life's work to the examination and proliferation of the Socratic ideals of goodness, truth, justice, and freedom.[i] We have him to thank for all the dialogues that recount the teachings of Socrates.
Plato’s idealism has been much misunderstood throughout the ages,[ii] but there is no mistaking the spirit with which he went about, on Socrates' advice, questioning the assumptions that others are want to take for granted, and proliferating the ideals of human perfectibility which he and Socrates shared, despite the mediocrity which was, and is, the norm.
Though Plato and many like him have been called dreamers by histories more fanatic realists, and are said to have lacked practical efficacy simply because no government has yet been erected in the explicit form of his ideal republic, I think, that the spirit of Plato's philosopher king has been alive and exercising its power throughout history through a dynamic of emergent power in every field, including, as we shall see, science and education. No power structure is explicitly Platonic because power, for Plato, did not mean structure, but influence, and politics for him meant the interactive influence of persons on one another--such as the influence that courageous idealists like him have had on those of us who learn from, emulate, and remember them.
"By concentration on this point of view and its implications Greek thought and art achieved a clarity never equaled elsewhere and Plato became its supreme spokesman."[iii]
"[T]he Academy had a continuous life of nine hundred years, a longer life span than that of any other educational institution in the West. This is scarcely the portrait of an armchair philosopher spinning theories in a study lined with books from floor to ceiling."[iv]
Thus, despite a lack of direct influence, Plato was hardly impotent. We have reason to take such idealism as his seriously when we consider the indirect influence that such great teachers have had on the course of history simply by raising the standards of all human enterprises, from family and friendship to institutions of state and science. The "intense interest in the correction of social and political abuses,"[v] that these visionaries shared has inspired more historical goals, choices, and decisions than we can ever know.
Both classical and romantic trends are movements in the name of 'human values' against the extremes of both government and individual rule. The difference between them is always in how 'human values' are defined, and the dynamic itself is a function of our apparently necessary inability to settle on just what these values ought to be. This is not a bad thing. It is good, I think, that the question remains--despite those who have long since answered it--What is the good for humans? And, as we shall see through the work of more contemporary idealists, the answer is still as the oracle's dictum proclaimed, to "Know thyself." The lesson to be learned is that we must learn the lesson, individually. That is, we must continue to inquire in order to answer the question for ourselves. There are no simple once-and-for-all answers, only simple and universal principles that need to be applied to infinitely complex particulars.
Whereas Plato wrote while Socrates spoke to his audience, their method for making idealism realistic--in Aristotle's favorite sense, i.e. practical--is the same and in keeping with the oracles advice:
"At the heart ... of the doctrine was the insistence upon the supreme duty of 'tending the soul' and making it as perfect as possible. By this Plato meant that it is man's obligation to know, to grasp the meaning of the world rationally, and to manage his conduct in accordance with that insight." [vi]
There are many great teachers who have contributed immeasurably to this cause through their words and their sacrifices. These and most of the courageous idealists who have advanced human perfectibility have done so, as Socrates and Plato made clear, through the method of dialogue:
"[Plato] believed as a philosopher that the world is pervaded by Reason, and that its beauty is an outward manifestation of its ultimate nature. The dialogue form permitted him to lead men to this insight... The dialogue therefore is the dialectic, a skillfully directed technique of questioning. For this reason he described the dialectician as the midwife tending us in the act, in the ‘labor,’ of knowing. To change the metaphor, the dialectician is like the gardener who aids his plants but is unable to do for them what they must do themselves. ... Its effectiveness lies in the effort it demands on the part of the participants, and its achievement, as in the case of the plant, is fulfillment. In fact, the essence of Platonism may be said to be the realization that we can and must know, not by trial and error, which teaches too late, if indeed it teaches much at all, but by coming to see what is possible, and what is not possible, in the world in which we live."[vii]
Here in the late twentieth-century streets and squares of Athens, men still spend their days gathered with their own, discussing--what?--their families, their shops, their lost hopes, their new dreams. One tells me he dreams of coming to America...like I have long dreamed of coming to Greece. A shop keeper tells my companion and I about his daughter's wedding and his beautiful grandchildren. A young man, a student, gives us directions and asks with a smile and a full pack hanging out of his pocket, if we have a cigarette. Human beings in all places and all times have found it perhaps the favorite of all past times--talking to one another. We do not talk any less that the ancients did...but some of us seem to have forgotten what they were talking about. Happily, others of us have not.
[i][edited into body] Plato is criticized for what looks like an acceptance of inequalities, but as Cairns points out, "In Plato's hands aristocracy meant the rule of the best, from whatever class they came. The able were to receive special training for the responsibilities requiring great ability; the less able were to perform the tasks suitable to their ability. Plato's political theory is an implication of the system of nature, and to call this philosophy aristocratic is meaningful only in the sense that nature is itself aristocratic. But to call any philosophy aristocratic in the sense of class interest is meaningless; preoccupation with the interests of one class to the detriment of others is not philosophy. Philosophy is disinterested or it is not philosophy. When ideas are manipulated for personal ends, for class or group interests, the name for this in Plato's day was sophistry. It was against this that all the dialogues were directed. To accuse Plato of being in league with the sophistic forces that undermined the classical world is an instance of the more subtle misrepresentation of his position." (Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xvi)
[ii]As Berkeley's argument for idealism illustrates, (that "...in the end, all we can know about the objective world are ideas existing in the mind.(Treatise: p 24) "...extension, figure and motion are only ideas existing in the mind ... the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind."(Treatise: p.26-27) some kinds of idealism seem at first to reduce reality to knowledge, and knowledge to perception -- but direct understanding of ideas is no matter to be undervalued. As I understand it, sensory content is understood in this form of idealism as the flowing images of consciousness, experiencing reality directly, primarily, and using words only to connect by association our meaningful images with those of others. The capacity of mind that is language allows reference and the possibility of communication that allows for the intelligent use of words. But it is thoughts which give reason to words to begin with. To be an idealist with regard to these matters does not require throwing out objective reality, for thoughts are objectively real nonarbitrary images -- they just aren't physical and concrete objects. Here, as for Locke, thoughts = ideas, which are objectively real, just not objects in and of themselves; rather, they require subjective interpretation and arbitrary word association to establish the connections of communication with others. Ideas, or thoughts, or concepts, or notions, for Berkeley, are independently real, perceivable whether we know the words for them or not. Whereas words, by their power to refer, are the subjective inventions we use to communicate ideas. While truth, by Locke, means correspondence between ideas and objects, for Berkeley truth is correspondence between ideas and words. And "we need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge."(Bishop Berekley, Treatise p. 22.)
Cairns says this about Plato's attitude about that: "[T]he information we derive from our senses varies with conditions. ... What our senses report about objects is not wholly responsible and must be corrected by intelligence. ... In Platonism order is not the sum of the laws that science discovers but the principle of all laws, the logos or Intelligence itself. Plato approached this problem on the assumption that when we classify things under a general name we do so because permanence and order are there."(Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xviii) "He has no doubt that the Ideas exist outside the human mind, and shows that by turning our attention to ultimate problems we attain knowledge, for our intelligence, like the eye, beholds that toward which it is turned; if we do not look we do not see."(Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xix)
Berkeley exhibits this other kind of idealism too--that is, idealism as belief in human goodness--by calling for a new understanding of the universal human being, which, rather than an abstracted stereotype taken from particular individuals known from direct experience being used to generalize over "man in general", is a concept of human being which does not limit our becoming. Since it required only "mental manufacturing" to begin with, it needs only mental reformulation to change. It is an idea that was invented and is amendable by "men" (too obviously) or, at any rate, people. Our idea of personhood needs reevaluation, toward retaining only what is common to all -- the essence, or principle of humanness -- in order to see the potential that human beings still have. (Bishop Berekley, Treatise p.22)
[iii](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xiii)
[iv](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xiii)
[v](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xiv)
[vi](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xx-xxi)
[vii](Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xiv-xv)