Plato on How the Good "Provides Being and Essence"

Plato on How the Good “Provides Being and Essence” Robert M. Wallace (Probaby one of the biggest mysteries of Plato interpretation is, why should we agree with him that the Good “provides being and essence” [to einai te kai ten ousian] to the things that we know [Republic 509b])? Most modern thought assumes the opposite: that what is can be good or bad, indifferently. This essay aims to show how Plato is right, and modern thought is wrong, so that (for example) the natural sciences as we currently understand them, which give no special role to the Good, can’t be the final authority regarding what is or is real. Only what responds to the Good can be said to be or be real in the fullest sense of those words. The essay also responds to many of the objections that are raised against Platonism by writers like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Gregory Vlastos, Richard Rorty, Hans Blumenberg, and Martha Nussbaum. The first such objection is the common one, famously put forward by Nietzsche, that Plato hates life in the material world…. This essay is Chapter 5—the first of four chapters on Plato—of Robert M. Wallace, Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020]. It was originally entitled “Plato’s Progress.”) (14,000 words) Fleeing is not a liberation from what is … fled from; the one that excludes still remains connected to what it excludes. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good … but everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here. Plato, Republic 505d —Alienating “Dualisms” and Plato— I’ve been suggesting all along that the broadly Platonic tradition can help us to integrate ourselves and be fully free, without “fleeing” from the world and consequently, as Hegel says, “remaining connected” to it and unfree. [Because what you flee from is not you but is a major fact about you, it reduces your ability to be in charge, yourself, of what you are.] But this claim about the Platonic tradition [that it can help us to avoid this unfree “fleeing”] might seem rather questionable. Plato is often described as the originator of a “dualism” of soul versus body, in which the body would be the “enemy” of the soul, and precisely something to “flee” from. How can the same philosopher who seems to be centrally responsible, through at least some of his writings, for the highly oppositional tradition of soul/body dualism, offer us the help that we need in order to avoid what Hegel calls “fleeing [that] is not a liberation”? Plato can do this because from the beginning he undermined his own apparent dualism, seeking to capture what’s true in it without making himself divided and unfree. In this way, he anticipated the West’s long debates between the dualisms of the Gnostics, Martin Luther, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, and the early Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and the more “monistic” but spiritual syntheses of Plotinus, Erasmus, Spinoza, Hegel, and Whitehead, on the other. —Plato Is Contested Territory— As with Hegel, many people who are aware of Plato have strong opinions about him. We correctly associate Plato with ideas that are regarded as religious, like the soul, transcendence, and the like. So people who have had bad experiences with institutions that call themselves religious may be inclined to take a jaundiced view of Plato. We also correctly associate Plato with “reason,” of which some people are very suspicious because reason in the form of modern science and technology seems to have disenchanted our world and left us with little room for love, beauty, and the like. When Plato criticizes the arts as promoting irrationality, this seems to confirm that he has taken the wrong side on this great issue. Political battles also come into play, because Plato, in this respect resembling some modern people who present themselves as religious, had major doubts about democracy. And so we project our modern political struggles onto Plato and onto writers who find value in his work. In the next several chapters, I’ll try to show that Plato in fact embraces all “sides,” religion and art and reason and also democracy and criticism of democracy, in a way that’s both intelligible and deeply helpful. Beyond that, I’ll show how the “rational religion” that Plato outlines is as inspiring as any religion could be, by virtue of the relationship that Plato uncovers between reason and love. And how the non-dualistic transcendence on which this religion is based can explain, also, how reason requires justice, how mind relates to body, and how value relates to “fact.” —Plato’s Progress— Let’s begin, then, with the issue of “dualism”—of Plato’s apparent belief that there is an inherent and inevitable antagonism between “soul” and “body.” Plato was apparently responding, over the course of his life’s work, to two initial traumas. He may never have fully worked through them, but he did deal with them in increasingly adequate ways. The first trauma was the reign of terror conducted against the Athenian democrats in 404-403 BCE, when Plato was 23 years old, by an aristocratic clique, the “Thirty Tyrants,” who were led by Plato’s uncle, Critias. The second trauma, five years later in 399 BCE, was Athens’s judicial execution of Plato’s hero, Socrates, for allegedly “corrupting the youth” of Athens and not worshipping Athens’s gods. Conflict between the “aristocrats” of inherited wealth and the ordinary craftspeople and merchants who formed a majority in Athens’s decision-making assembly was a chronic feature of Athenian life in the fifth century. It was driven to a high pitch by the long war between Athens and Sparta which was carried on largely by the “democratic” party, initially under the leadership of Pericles. When Sparta defeated Athens, in 404, Sparta installed the Athenian aristocrats in power in the city, and the aristocrats seized the opportunity to settle old scores, brutally. After the “Thirty” fell from power, in 403, the resurgent democrats wisely enacted an amnesty, so as to avoid an ongoing battle of tit for tat between the parties. But strong feelings undoubtedly persisted for a long time thereafter. Socrates himself wasn’t rich, and he believed in a government of laws and justice, as opposed to tyranny. So he disapproved (and Plato clearly shared his disapproval) of the actions of the “Thirty” and refused, at considerable personal risk, to cooperate with them. Despite Socrates’s resistance to the “Thirty,” there may have been a connection between what happened when they were in power and the jury’s conviction of Socrates, five years later. Many of the jurors may have mistakenly thought of Socrates as a supporter of the “Thirty,” and harbored negative feelings toward him for that reason. This is because Socrates’s circle of associates over the years included quite a few members, such as Plato himself, of the aristocratic families from which the “Thirty” drew their members. There is ongoing scholarly disagreement about the respective roles of politics and religious issues in Socrates’s trial and conviction. (See Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith [2002].) The accusers’ allegations were religious, not political. But it seems safe to say that many of the jurors must have been aware, from long observation and gossip, that a significant number of Socrates’s associates were not supporters of Athens’s democracy. And it’s all but certain that a large majority of the jury in the trial identified with the democratic side. In view of this circumstance that is likely to have contributed to Socrates’s being convicted, it’s quite possible that Plato may have felt some indirect responsibility, through his family, for Socrates’s death. What’s certain is that Socrates’s death was a watershed event for Plato. “Socrates” is the main protagonist, always presented in a very positive light, in the written dialogues to which Plato devoted many years of work. From them we derive most of our knowledge of the actual Socrates and of the philosophy that Plato developed in response to Socrates’s teaching and various other influences. In the Republic, the character called “Socrates” suggests that ordinary people would be likely to want to kill a person who had found more truth than they had found, and who tried to share it with them (517a). This is one of many indications in the dialogues that Plato was preoccupied, in all of his thinking about politics and ethics, with the issue of Socrates’s death, and how a society might be created in which such tragic events wouldn’t occur. It may be easier for us to understand the quite undemocratic nature of the political institutions that Plato seems to recommend, if we remember that the Athenian democracy had executed Plato’s teacher and hero. In addition to Plato’s thinking about politics, one could easily interpret some of his best-known ideas about the human “soul,” itself, and its relation to the “body,” as at least partly a response to his extended trauma. If the soul is separate from the body and survives it, then Socrates’s soul can be with the immortals, regardless of what the ignorant Athenians did to his body. In this way, the “dualistic” Plato could have been Plato’s first, very natural reaction to his trauma. But other aspects of Plato’s thinking could reflect a realization that his dualism might not actually give him as much freedom as it seemed to—that “fleeing” might not, in fact, make him free. These other aspects of Plato’s thinking are subtle and aren’t flagged as dramatically as the initial dualism was. So writers who are all clearly influenced by Plato can nevertheless wind up disagreeing with each other in major ways on these central issues. Dualism recurs in the Gnostics, in aspects of Plotinus and Rumi, in Martin Luther, in Rene Descartes, in Kant’s Critiques, in Schopenhauer, and in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A non-dualistic but still broadly Platonic view appears in Aristotle, in other aspects of Plotinus and Rumi, in Meister Eckhart, Erasmus, Spinoza, Hegel, Whitehead, Polanyi, and Rödl. While Plato gave us what seems to be a powerful statement of dualism, in the early part of his Phaedo, he also set in motion these non-dualistic trains of thought. He did this first of all through his thinking about reality, the Forms, God, and the world, which was never really as bluntly dualistic as it sometimes sounds. He did it also through his systematic study of the intermediate realm, between “body” and rational “soul,” which we call “emotion.” Plato examines pride, anger, and especially love, and shows us how they all combine bodily aspects and important “rational” aspects. Let’s begin with a brief look at his apparent dualism. —Plato the Apparent Dualist— Plato’s Phaedo concludes with the scene in which Socrates, in prison, says farewell to his friends, and drinks the poison hemlock to which the Athenian court has condemned him, because he (allegedly) corrupted the youth of Athens and didn’t worship Athens’s gods. Plato describes Socrates as spending the day of his execution in a lengthy discussion, with his friends, of the possible immortality of the individual human soul. The connection of this topic with Socrates’s impending death is clear to everyone. And Socrates in fact asserts, in the dialogue, that he’s convinced that souls are immortal, and offers several elaborate arguments in support of this idea. In terms of its sheer historical influence, the most important of these arguments is probably the first major one, in which Socrates appeals to the existence of what he calls “Forms.” These are (for example) “the Just,” “the Beautiful,” “the Good,” “Bigness,” “Health,” “Strength”—that is, they are what just, beautiful, good, big, healthy or strong things “essentially” are (65d). These underlying essences can’t be observed directly in particular things in the world, since those things are only imperfectly just, beautiful, big, and so forth. So Socrates suggests that our souls must have become acquainted with these essences when our souls existed apart from the body, before our present lives (76c). And thus we can know that our souls can and sometimes do exist apart from our bodies. In connection with this argument, Socrates asserts that philosophers, who understand these facts, “despise” food, drink, sex, bodily ornaments, and everything that has to do with the body (64e). They do their best to “flee” from the body (65d), by purifying the soul of bodily concerns (69c), so as to consort as much as possible with the bodiless truth that is the Forms. This is the famous Platonic “asceticism” (or “rampant Platonism,” as John McDowell calls it), which Friedrich Nietzsche influentially diagnosed as “an expression of hatred for a world that makes one suffer,” adding that “the ressentiment of metaphysicians is here creative.” F. Nietzsche (1967), p. 519. “Ressentiment,” French for “resentment,” connotes a seeking for revenge. It’s easy to suppose that if Plato himself endorsed this version of immortality, which he conjures up in quite a few places, it must have given him some consolation for, in particular, the loss of Socrates himself. Socrates’s soul survives, in the company of the immortals. However that may be, this passage in the Phaedo has indeed been one of the great documents of body-rejecting ascetic dualism, inspiring to many people, and to many others questionable, or itself needing to be rejected. To me its apparent message is definitely questionable. It seems clear to me that (as Hegel says) “fleeing” from something doesn’t make you free of it. Instead, fleeing chains you to the thing from which you flee: it ensures that your functioning will be deeply imprinted by that thing, and by your relationship to it. To be imprinted in this way may be better than being uncritically mixed up with the thing, but it’s hardly full freedom, since it’s not self-determination. Many of Plato’s modern critics, such as David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell, focus their objections on the soul/body antagonism that we seem to see in the Phaedo. In his Treatise (1978), David Hume objects to the doctrine that “every rational creature is obliged … to regulate his actions by reason” (p. 413), maintaining on the contrary that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (p. 415). Hume doesn’t explain where the authority of this “ought only to be” comes from. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Zarathustra (1883-1885), probably has both Christianity and Platonism in mind in his highly critical sections “On the Afterworldly” and “On the Despisers of the Body.” We can see from these sections that Nietzsche assumes that “pure spirit and the good as such” (whose invention by Plato he laments in his Beyond Good and Evil [1966], p. 2) will “despise” the body and its desires. A similar view of Plato is promoted by Russell (1945); by Martha Nussbaum (1987), Chapters 5 and 6 on Plato; and by Simon Blackburn (2007). A different vew is represented by Terence Irwin (1989), pp. 114-115; Richard Kraut, in his Introduction to Kraut, ed. (1992), pp. 9-10; and Lloyd Gerson (2003). Irwin and Kraut suggest that the mature Plato is not “other-worldly.” Gerson defends the Phaedo, together with the dialogues that follow it, as presenting not an antagonistic dualism but a radical argument to the effect that the human body is less real than the soul. “The fundamental contrast for Plato is between the ideal disembodied person or self we strive to become and its embodied image” (p. 9), where an “image,” for Plato, is less real than what it’s an image of. I will develop a thought similar to Gerson’s. I myself sympathized with their objections for a long time, for the reason that I just mentioned. Antagonism toward the body seemed not to be fully free. —Plato the Non-Dual Rationalist— But in vewing Plato in this way, the critics and I were overlooking the radical explanation that Plato begins to articulate in the Phaedo, and fills in in more detail in the Republic and later dialogues. In “fleeing” the body, Plato says, we’re fleeing something that isn’t fully real! If we understand the diminished reality that Plato imputes to the body, we’ll see that “flight from” the body is a manner of speaking, which is better put, in many other contexts in the dialogues, as the pursuit of what is fully real. It has long been common to describe Plato’s metaphysics as a “two-world” view, in which one world is that of the Forms and the other is that of bodies and sensation. I find this traditional label quite unfortunate, because it suggests that these “two worlds” are in some important way equal. They are both described as “worlds.” Whereas the gist of what I think Plato wants to say about them is precisely that they’re not equal, because only the world of the Forms is fully “real.” The “body” or the senses may present distractions, but they don’t constitute a separate “world,” and we don’t need to go to another place to find the truth. In which case, the one who pursues would not be imprinted by the body and entangled with it in the way that we critics have suspected Plato of being. I still suspect that Plato’s talk of “fleeing” and “despising” probably betrays an emotional unfreedom that may have been an important part of his initial response to the double trauma that I described. I doubt very much that Plato’s extended study of the emotions was motivated solely by “disinterested” curiosity. He had had major emotional experiences, including the traumas that I mentioned, and his analytical thinking about inner freedom, pride, and love must have helped him to work through these experiences. But what impresses me now is how early in that process he seems to begin to get beyond the antagonism that his habitual language still suggests. In the passage in the Phaedo that has set off warning bells for many readers, Plato’s central concern is not, in fact, with the negative influence of the body, but rather with the positive affinity between the soul and the (non-bodily) Forms. In the passage at 65c-d that describes the soul as “disdaining” and “fleeing” the body, Socrates’s main concern is with how the soul can gain access to “truth” or “reality.” Suggesting that the body’s senses deceive the soul and confuse it, he proposes that the soul that is successful in the search for truth seeks to be “by itself” (65d), and thus to track down realities “pure and by themselves” (66a). Here we might think especially of the search for mathematical truths. Mathematics was one of Plato’s major interests, and some of his friends were brilliant mathematicians. In the dialogue called the Meno, Plato’s Socrates has a discussion with an untutored slave boy from whom whom he elicits unexpected understanding of how one could find a square whose area is double that of a previously given square. (Answer: construct the square on the diagonal of the initial square.) Socrates suggests that this understanding derives not primarily from the slave boy’s observation of the particular squares that Socrates draws in the dust, but rather from the birth of insight, in him, into the reasons why all squares must obey this general rule. Through our familiarity with abstract reasoning in mathematics, we’re accustomed to the idea that (at least) certain kinds of knowledge are based not on inspecting what we touch or see, as such, but rather on abstract reasoning. No number of measurements of particular squares can prove that the diagonal of an initial square will always yield a square with double its area. Only arguments from (possibly) self-evident axioms can do that. This experience of learning through mathematical proof is one of the main sources of Plato’s notion that the soul can indeed usefully be “by itself” and find realities that don’t depend upon sense perception. So Plato’s primary concern in the passage in the Phaedo, with its famous ”despising” and “fleeing” of the body, is not with the body as such but rather with a kind of functioning, in the “soul,” which seems to be most successful when it ignores the body. A functioning, as he puts it, of the soul ”by itself.” The notorious language of “despising,” and so forth, is a secondary feature of a train of thought that’s primarily concerned with something quite different, namely, with the abstractness that characterizes certain very fruitful kinds of inquiry, and from which the body’s senses can be a source of distraction. Gerson (2003), p. 57, underscores the positive nature of this passage. —Platonism and “Embodied Human Experience”— At this point I can imagine someone saying: “But human beings aren’t theorems in mathematics! Surely if we leave behind sight, touch, hearing, and smell, and the emotions that go with them, we’ll leave behind concrete human life and wind up with empty abstractions. To call mathematics and Forms ‘more real’ than the human experience of embodiment is impossibly paradoxical. My bodily experience is my paradigm of what’s real. I can’t imagine how someone could seriously propose that something else is more real than it.” Plato’s most effective single response to this kind of objection is contained in a passage in book vi of the Republic whose full importance isn’t often recognized. The passage culminates in the statement that I quoted in the epigraph of this chapter: “Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good … but everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here” (505d). To explain how this dictum speaks to the issue of “reality” and bodily experience, I need to outline its context, which is a discussion that begins in Plato’s account of the three “parts of the soul,” in book iv. I’m using the phrase, “parts of the soul,” loosely here, because it’s widely used to refer to what Plato discusses in Republic book iv. In fact I sympathize with Jennifer Whiting’s argument that Plato doesn’t intend here to present a doctrine about the make-up of “the soul” as such, but only to describe the condition into which a soul can fall if it doesn’t operate in an ideal way (“Psychic Contingency in the Republic” [2012]). There, Socrates describes how we make up our minds about what to do. We experience “appetites,” such as thirst, that urge courses of action, such as drinking. But sometimes we also experience the thought that we should resist the appetite, and not do what it urges. For example, that we shouldn’t drink what’s in front of us, because it will harm us in some way. This familiar experience, Socrates says, shows that the soul has at least two different parts: the appetites, on the one hand, and the “reasoning” part, on the other. The conflict that we experience is the evidence that these are different parts. Socrates goes on to identify a third part of the soul, as well: the part that gets angry when someone mistreats us, or when we mistreat ourselves. In Socrates’s striking example, a man named Leontius feels a desire to look at some recently executed corpses, but is also angry at himself for giving in to this ignoble desire. This shows, Socrates says, that besides the appetites and the reasoning part, our souls also have a “spirited” part (thumos, in Greek), which gets indignant at actions that it regards as incompatible with the person’s dignity. The spirited part is obviously different from the appetites, which inspire these actions, but it’s also different from the reasoning part, because sometimes we feel anger at things that our reasoning part eventually says are okay. The spirited part claims to speak on behalf of reason, as opposed to appetites like Leontius’s desire to look at the corpses; but because the spirited part is emotional and hasty, it doesn’t always accurately reflect what reason will eventually conclude. What I want to examine now is the conflict between appetite and the rational part. What Plato has Socrates say about it may not seem very controversial. So it’s important to remember that influential thinkers have in fact suggested that when reason appears to be coming into conflict with an appetite, all that’s really happening is that one appetite is coming into conflict with another. Our appetite for a drink is coming into conflict, say, with our appetite for other satisfactions that we won’t be able to enjoy if the drink that’s in front of us turns out to be poisonous and we don’t live long enough to satisfy the other appetites. This is the view of Epicurus, in ancient Greece, of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, and of perhaps all twentieth-century materialists, naturalists, empiricists, and positivists. If what we call “reasoning” were really just weighing one appetite against others and figuring out which appetite or group of appetites is the strongest, then the inner conflict that Plato describes would simply be a competition among the parts of the appetitive part, to see which one is stronger. It wouldn’t be a negotiation between the appetitive part and something outside it. Then our situation would be one in which, as David Hume put it, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” by figuring out how to get what our appetites want. David Hume (1978), p. 415. We need to examine this view carefully, because it’s extremely influential in our own time, especially among social scientists. When the Harvard psychologist, B.F. Skinner compared human behavior to rat behavior, he assumed that neither the rats nor the humans go beyond the kind of competition among appetites, to see which appetite is the strongest, that Epicurus and Hume take to be going on in us. Skinner wrote that “The disputing of values is not only possible, it is interminable. To escape from it we must get outside the system…. When we can design small social interactions and, possibly, whole cultures with the confidence we bring to physical technology, the question of value will not be raised” (Daedalus [1961], pp. 535-6, 545). To which one can only reply that while Skinner himself might not raise it, others may have more inquiring minds than his. In contrast to Socrates (Plato, Apology of Socrates, 38a), Skinner in this essay was, in effect, an apostle of the “unexamined life.” The “cognitive scientists” who have recently criticized Skinner’s “behaviorism” for its excessive skepticism about the existence of “inner” mental mechanisms, don’t seem to differ importantly from Skinner, Epicurus, and Hume about the role of reason in our practical decision-making. And when economists and political scientists describe us as acting to satisfy our “preferences,” they employ a similar conception of human decision-making. In none of these models does “reason” get any role other than figuring out which appetite or preference is stronger, and how to satisfy the stronger one, or a mixture of the two which reflects their relative strengths. Something like this is widely thought to be the only “scientific” view of human decision-making; and people who see the matter in this way are likely to regard “idealists” or “rationalists,” who disagree with this sort of view, as unscientific wishful thinkers. But in the passage that I quoted from Republic book vi, Plato aims to show that however widespread this “naturalist” or “empiricist” view may be, it nevertheless is mistaken. —Questioning and What’s Really Good— In the case of just and beautiful things, many people are content with what are believed to be so, even if they aren’t really so. [But] nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good … everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here. (Republic 505d) Here Socrates is saying that regarding the things, experiences, relationships, and so forth, that we get for ourselves, we want to be sure that they really are good, rather than just being what we, or other people, think is good. We don’t want to live in a “fool’s paradise,” thinking that we’re experiencing what’s really good, when in fact it isn’t really good. Even if we could be sure that we would remain in this fool’s paradise for our entire lives, and never find out that we had been mistaken, we hate the thought that that might be the case—that what we take to be really good, might not really be good. If that were the case, we feel, our lives would have been wasted, whether or not we ever found out that they were wasted. We can joke about how other people are “blissfully ignorant,” but I have yet to meet a person who says that she would choose to have less information about what’s really good, if by doing so she could be sure of getting lots of what she currently thinks is good. The notion of choice, itself, seems to be oriented towards finding out (if possible) what’s really good, rather than just being guided by one’s current desires or one’s current opinions about what’s good. As applied to Skinner’s view of human motivation, and other naturalist or empiricist views, what Socrates’s response says is that since we want what’s really good, what we feel drawn to right now isn’t the final word regarding what we really want. Because if we came to the conclusion that what we feel drawn to right now wasn’t really good, we would stop wanting it, or at least stop wanting it wholeheartedly, and start wanting what we had concluded was really good. That is, we humans are able to question our wants and our appetites, and resist them or revise them or work around them when we conclude that they are ill-informed or mistaken. No doubt some of our wants, such as for things that we’re addicted to, will be difficult to resist. But nobody doubts that we can sometimes do things that will at least reduce the likelihood that we’ll act on wants that we’ve concluded were mistaken. This ability to question what we feel drawn to right now, and to draw practical consequences from this questioning, is not something that naturalist or empiricist views take adequately into account. Their advocates try to describe the experience of questioning as just another case of conflict between wants or appetites. When I question whether the drink that’s in front of me will be good for me, they say, what I’m really doing is asking whether I have other wants that will be frustrated if I drink the drink. Such as wanting to see the sun rise tomorrow, or whatever it might be. But Plato’s response is that I can question any and all of my wants, including my wanting to see the sun rise tomorrow, by asking whether it will really be good for me to satisfy these wants. We may well wonder how we could answer questions like these. If we question all of our wants at once, what standard will be left, by reference to which we can answer all of these innumerable questions? Is this project of unlimited questioning, a project that we can actually afford to embark upon? As B.F. Skinner complained, “The disputing of values … is interminable.” See previous note. But regardless of how difficult it may be to implement it in practice, Plato’s initial point seems like a strong one. We need to raise these questions because we want to wind up with what’s really good, and not just what we currently feel drawn to as a result of what we ate for breakfast this morning, or what our parents told us is good, or what evolution has wired us to want. —Contradictions in Naturalism— The naturalist or empiricist view seems to say: Shut up and do what your breakfast or your parents or your evolutionary history has wired you to do! But if I’m a serious person and I’m deciding (for example) how to spend my life, I’m not going to find the naturalist’s or empiricist’s advice very attractive. I want a life that’s really good for me, not just a life that I’m wired to live. As long as there is hope of finding out what’s really good, that’s what I’m going to want to do. A.J. Ayer ([1935/1946], p. 103) dramatically asserted that “in so far as statements of value … are not scientific, they are not in the literal sense significant, but are simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false.” Platonists, in response, point out that we appear to be able to think in a disciplined way about what’s really good. I’ll discuss Plato’s account of this process in a bit more detail in the next chapter. For a nuanced defense of the idea that what’s good could be a fact like other facts, see Thomas M. Scanlon (2016). Rats, I suppose, can’t ask questions like these, and thus can’t get into the kind of quandary of which the history of philosophy and religion is certainly full. But as long as it seems that I can ask this kind of question, it seems that I ought to, because if I don’t ask it, I’m only half alive. In fact, if the naturalist or empiricist actually said that I should stop trying to ask this kind of question, and just be satisfied with what I’m wired to do, they wouldn’t just be telling me what I’m wired to do. For if I were just plain wired to do it, they wouldn’t have to urge me to do it. Rather, in telling me to stop asking questions they would be telling me what I really ought to do or what it would be best for me to do, and thus conceding by their actions that these are important things to think about and discuss. When a naturalist or empiricist becomes involved in public controversy about matters of value, she should be embarrassed, since according to her theory that reason “is and ought to be the slave of the passions,” there is no rational way to settle such a controversy. But in fact, the issue with naturalism isn’t just about what we should really do, but also about what we should really believe. If reason “ought to be the slave of the passions,” this will apply just as much to belief as to anything else, and we will no longer be able to say that we ought to believe what has been tested by science, as opposed to whatever just pops into our heads. A thorough-going naturalist can’t tell us that we “ought” to proceed differently in the case of science than we do in the case of life-planning and ethics. It will all depend upon what our “passions” happen to be. In this way it’s hard to see how how one can consistently take Hume’s naturalistic line that reason ought to be the slave of the passions, while maintaining, as most self-described naturalists do, that we rationally ought to give authority in our lives to science rather than superstition. Plato’s analysis of the soul speaks to this practical contradiction in naturalism. Plato concludes from what we’ve observed about our attitudes toward science and toward what’s really good, that regardless of what we may say, we don’t really believe that reason ought to be the slave of the passions. Rather, the “reasoning part” of the soul has an independent role to play, which is to question everything that we’re currently inclined to want and to believe, so as to get behind it, to what’s really good and what’s really true. How exactly such “reasoning” will operate, remains to be seen. My point is simply that Plato seems to have given us a good reason to take the “reasoning part” seriously, as something with its own distinctive role to play, rather than as a mere slave of the passions. —Questioning and the Existence of Forms— In fact, we might take this account of the soul’s investment in seeking what’s really good and really true as one of Plato’s major reasons for taking seriously his notion of Forms that have a reality that can’t be reduced to what we can experience with our five senses. In mathematics, we persist in thinking that the diagonal of a given square will yield a square with twice the area in every case, and not just in the squares that we have measured or will measure. And in conducting our lives, Plato suggests in Republic 505d, we persist in thinking that what’s really good need not be reducible to what we will ever want, or believe is good. In both cases, we want what’s really true, rather than just what seems on the basis of our present or future sense-experience or beliefs to be true. That we want this is one of Plato’s strongest arguments for his proposition that there is in fact a truth, the Forms, that isn’t reducible to sense experience. Perhaps it could be the case that this “want” is chimerical, that what we want doesn’t in fact exist. But Plato is pointing out that a major part of our mental activity presupposes that this truth that we want does exist, in the case of our life-conduct just as much as in the case of mathematics. —The Forms as “More Real”— Plato repeatedly tells us that the Forms are “more real” than what we experience with our senses. Republic 515d: “things that are more” (mallon onta); Republic 585c: “this is more” (mallon einai); Timaeus 28a: “It … never really is” (ontos de oudepote on); Republic 478d: “what purely is (tou eilikrinos ontos).” Further references can be found in Gregory Vlastos (1973 and 1981), pp. 43-44. We can see now what he might mean by this. The Forms are the truth, about mathematical objects, about what’s good, and about other objects as well. What we experience with our senses may be responsive to this truth, or it may not. To the extent that it’s responsive to this truth, it’s really real, and to the extent that it isn’t responsive, it isn’t really real, though in both cases it equally exists. By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of, is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves. In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different “parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”: Justice … is concerned with what is truly himself and his own…. [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts … and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (443d-e) Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingedients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one,” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.” In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs. We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times. Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you? Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves. Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality-as-oneself than is present without them. Plato doesn’t explicitly describe the soul’s “being itself” as making the soul more “real.” But in the Phaedo he describes the soul and the Forms as “kin” (79d) and “like” one another (80b). In the original passage that we looked at, he associates the soul’s being “by itself” (65d) with the Forms’ becoming clear to it (65-66). And the conclusion of the Phaedo as a whole is, of course, that the soul is probably immortal, just as the Forms are. Thus we can probably safely suppose that one way in which the soul ideally approaches the Forms and fulfills its kinship with them is by becoming, like the Forms, more real than soulless bodies are. Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense-experience, is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves. But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real, must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it. You might ask whether the reality of this “Form” needs to be “separate” from the reality of the human being that’s seeking to be guided by it. This issue has led to a great spilling of ink between Platonists, Aristotelians, and others. My suggestion would be that the Form needs to be “separate” in the sense that it needs to have a rational authority that we can’t find in what we receive through our sense organs or our heredity. For the purposes of the present book, it’s enough to say that we all accept this authority in practice, insofar as we engage in discussion of questions of truth and value. As Plato says, “Everyone wants the things that really are good…” (Republic 505d). Whatever despair we may sometimes express about determining what these really good things are, it’s highly unlikely that B. F. Skinner or anyone else has been able to refrain from having such discussions with himself and his intimates when they were faced with major life-decisions. And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves. This, then, is how Plato can seriously propose that something is more real than the human embodiment that we think of as paradigmatically real. Human embodiment is certainly real in the sense that it’s not (on the whole) illusory. But it’s not real in the sense of being fully itself, or making itself what it is. It depends upon many other things to make it what it is. Whereas what is “itself” and is “by itself,” as Socrates puts it at Phaedo 65d, does not depend upon other things to make it what it is. It’s real as itself, self-determining, self-contained. It’s not surprising that Plato took this, rather than the mere absence of illusion, as his paradigm of full reality, and described it in the Republic as a human being’s highest accomplishment. Lloyd Gerson points out that Plato’s account of persons describes personhood as an accomplishment, rather than just a given (Gerson [2003], pp. 3, 113). Plato’s student, Aristotle captures something like this in his account of “actuality” or “actualization” (energeia) as the fullest reality. —Contra Vlastos and Bröcker— Gregory Vlastos discussed Plato’s “degrees of reality” view in two papers, “Metaphysical Paradox” and “Degrees of Reality,” reprinted in Vlastos (1973 and 1981). In the first paper, he says that “in vision of Form, Plato discovers … his own personal bridge from [time as a state of bondage] to [time under the aspect of eternity, regeneration] via [eternity, the blessedness of release].” (I combine two sentences of which Vlastos confusingly indexes one to the other.) “How natural then for [Plato] to say that the eternal things, the Forms, are the ‘really real’ ones. In seeing [the Forms,] a creature of time touches eternity.” Vlastos calls the resulting “restructuring of what there is on the scaffolding of what is more and less real … one of Plato’s greatest achievements, perhaps his greatest,” but adds that Plato should have acknowledged that it was “a personal vision for which demonstrative certainty cannot be claimed” (pp. 55-56; emphasis added). I would suggest that the way the Republic connects the vision of Forms with inner freedom and unity makes Plato’s view much less of an optional “personal vision” than Vlastos takes it to be. For inner freedom and unity are sought, in one way or another, by all of us; and thus insofar as the vision of Forms is a precondition of inner freedom and unity, we all seek the vision of Forms as well. Influential recent commentators have criticized what they call Vlastos’s “two worlds” interpretation of Plato in these papers (see G. Fine, “Knowledge and Belief in Republic V” [1978] and “Knowledge and Belief in Republic V-VII” [1990/1999], and P. Adamson (2014), ch. 22; and compare Irwin (1995), pp. 266-269). Gail Fine defines a “Two Worlds” interpretation of Plato as one according to which “knowledge” (episteme) can only be of Forms, and “belief” (doxa) can only be of objects of sensation. She suggests that a more plausible account of the key passage about knowledge and belief in Republic v (473c-480a) would take Plato to be distinguishing knowledge and belief as different ways of relating to propositions, rather than as ways of relating to different objects in the world. My suggestion that Plato is thinking of how the soul both is and is not (inasmuch as it sometimes pursues the Good and sometimes doesn’t) explains why Plato would be particularly concerned about the category of objects that both are and are not. This category includes us, as we usually conceive of ourselves. F. J. Gonzalez, “Propositions or Objects?” (1996), argues that Fine’s interpretation can’t make sense of Plato’s text because it leaves belief with no distinctive domain “over” which it is “set” (pp. 264-268, referring to 477a9). On Fine’s interpretation, belief applies to propositions just as knowledge applies to (some of the same) propositions. (On Fine’s interpretation, see also Lloyd Gerson [2003], pp. 161-166.) Fine is right to prefer the thought that the objects of sense are in some way identical to the objects of intellect. But she is mistaken if she thinks that this means we can ignore Plato’s suggestion that the objects of intellect are “more real” than the objects of sense. They are more real insofar as we (and along with us, the rest of the world of the senses) only sometimes live up to them and thus achieve full reality or identity as ourselves. This is the complexity of “being identical to.” If inner freedom and unity aren’t optional, neither is the vision of Forms. So when Walter Bröcker wrote in his critique of Plato and Hegel that Plato’s introduction of degrees of reality was “an act of compensation” for the “removal of gods from the world of the senses by the thinking of the ‘natural philosophers’” who preceded him ([1959], p. 425; my translation), Bröcker overlooked an important alternative explanation. Namely, that Plato was identifying a vertical dimension in the human experience of reality which had given the traditional gods their plausibility in the first place, and which the natural philosophers hadn’t gotten into focus. Plato and Hegel do indeed have a good reason “to grant what is thinkable a higher rank than what is perceivable” (Bröcker, p. 424), which is that more than perception, thinking enables the thinker to be herself, and (in that sense) more real than what doesn’t think. So that thinking gives the world as a whole a higher degree of reality-as-itself than it would otherwise possess. —Reality as a Vertical Dimension— In modern times most of us have become accustomed to understanding “reality” simply as a uniform, horizontal plane, as (so to speak) a standard minimum endowment. Whereas Plato and those who follow him see reality as having an essential vertical dimension, a hierarchy of gradations, whereby some things are more successful in being themselves, and in that sense they’re more fully real, than others. Thus rather than being “other-worldly,” in the sense of postulating a separate “world” from this one, Plato postulates a scale of increasing reality in this “world.” So when Plato has Socrates say that “a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven” (Theaetetus 176a-b), we should understand this as hyperbole—as indeed what follows makes pretty clear: “and escape means becoming as like God as possible; and a man becomes like God when he becomes just and pure, with understanding.” This view of reality is more plausible when we see how it corresponds to an understanding of ourselves which recognizes how we can and often do fail to be fully in charge of our lives, fail to “be ourselves,” and fail (in that sense) to be real, as ourselves. When we consider how various kinds of living beings achieve lesser and greater degrees of self-government and (thus) lesser and greater degrees of reality “as themselves,” we can begin to see that “reality” isn’t merely a standard minimum endowment. Rather, it exhibits a hierarchy of lesser and greater degrees of what we might call “realization.” Plato’s Sophist suggests that he was reconsidering the sharp line that he had drawn in the Republic between what fully “is” and what has “change, life, soul, and intelligence” (248e). Stephen Menn ([1995], p. 70 n. 2) suggests that Plato, here, wants to get his earlier self “to admit that the human realities are also realities alongside the divine ones.” One wonders whether Menn thinks that the later Plato assigns no more “reality” to Forms than to their images. It seems to me that in order to retain both what drives his notion of Forms and his recognition in the Sophist that there can be no sharp dividing line between the divine and the human, Plato needs to think of the relation between the universal and the particular in the way that Hegel does, as a unity in difference, or a “concrete universal” (on which see Wallace [2005], p. 229). In this conception, the universal or Form is different from its particular instantiations, but not separable from them. Plotinus has a conception similar to this when he locates intellect and God “within us” but still beyond our “momentary acts” (Enneads VI.I.11). These conceptions preserve the higher authority and in that sense the fuller reality of the divine, without separating it entirely from the “change, life, soul, and intelligence” that concern the speaker in the Sophist. This fundamental recognition is expressed in various ways in the world’s religions and systems of metaphysics. Once one appreciates the experience that underlies and motivates this way of seeing the world, one can hardly dismiss it as mere anthropocentric illusion. For it doesn’t focus merely on human beings. It’s entirely ready to acknowledge that other living things may exhibit the same self-government as humans, and perhaps forms of self-government that we humans can barely imagine. And it traces a hierarchy of self-government in “lower” forms of life with which we still have a great deal in common. To say, as enthusiasts of Darwinian biology sometimes do, that humans are “merely” the tools of (say) their genes in an endless struggle for survival, is to ignore the hierarchy of degrees of self-government that life has achieved. Which is a hierarchy that is exhibited by the very pursuit of truth in whose name the Darwinist speaks. For rather than viewing his way of understanding life as something that merely increases the survival chances of his genes, the Darwinist clearly views it and expects us to be interested in it as something that may be objectively true. We want to be guided by reality, in our lives, whether or not that guidance increases the survival chances of our genes. Being guided by reality means not being guided merely by our desires or illusions, which are, in general, things that we’re “subjected to” by forces that we don’t understand or control. Whereas the thinking by means of which we determine what’s truly real, is something that we seem to be able, to a significant degree, to understand and control. If it’s true that we have such control, then our thinking expresses not just what we’re subjected to, but us. And thus our success in tracking what’s truly real expresses us. It’s possible, in some sense, that we don’t have any real control over our thinking. That would be the scenario of the extremest skepticism. But it’s not a scenario that we can usefully discuss, because the conduct of such a discussion, like the conduct of any serious attempt to determine what’s true, presupposes that we do have control over our thinking. We can’t assert that our current discussion or thinking isn’t under our control, without bringing it, effectively, to a grinding halt. But controlling our own thinking, rather than letting it be a mere response to external inputs, is a form of self-government. Science is a prime example of disciplined, self-controlled thinking, and therefore of self-government. So we must assume that science’s pursuit of objective truth is itself an instance of the ascent to a higher degree of self-government, and thus to a higher degree of reality as oneself, to which Plato and his followers are drawing our attention. Science, as I’ve said, is itself a project of transcendence. And so is any other form of disciplined thinking, such as thinking about what’s really Good. It’s unfortunate that few present-day accounts of Platonism bring out the way in which Platonism’s “vertical” hierarchy of increasing reality corresponds to our personal pursuit of greater self-government and thus of greater reality as ourselves. Drawing on his very plausible point that we want what’s really good, in our lives, rather than merely whatever we currently feel or think is good, Plato’s account of our greater self-government makes it clear why he attaches such great significance to the Forms, and the Form of the Good in particular. These are not only key ingredients in our understanding of the world and ourselves through mathematics, science, and value-inquiry, they are also key ingredients, thereby, in our effort to be fully real, as ourselves. Two interpreters of Plato’s metaphysics from whom I have learned a great deal, J. N. Findlay and Lloyd Gerson, exhibit the common weakness that they don’t make it clear why an uncommitted bystander should take seriously Plato’s claim that the Forms are more real than our human embodiment. Findlay suggests that one’s attitude on this subject may be a matter of temperament or social contingency. J.N. Findlay (1974), pp. 3, 412. Gerson too refers to temperament, saying that “Someone who unreservedly recognizes himself as ideally a thinker is probably the only plausible candidate for the sort of self-transformation Plato recommends. … The rarity of the true philosophical temperament, as Plato understands that, is hardly in doubt.” Lloyd Gerson (2003), p. 281. Whereas it seems to me that Plato provides considerations, in his account of the soul’s self-government, that will speak to any thoughtful person. I’ve just shown how something like Plato’s account of the soul’s self-government seems to be presupposed by any serious discussion about what’s objectively true about the world. It may be true that people who are “unreservedly” committed to this goal at any given time are rare, but it seems to me that most people experience its attraction quite frequently, and in that sense we are all candidates for the self-transformation that Plato recommends. —No Need for Ressentiment— So, as I suggested earlier, the vertical dimension that Plato sees in reality needn’t reflect any negative feelings about the body or the physical world as such. It simply reflects the insight that a person who is guided by her five senses and her felt desires and opinions rather than being guided by thought, is guided by external inputs of one kind or another rather than by herself, and thus fails to be fully herself and fully real, as herself. I quoted above Nietzsche’s famous remark from The Will to Power about the metaphysicians’ ressentiment. Bertrand Russell, quoting George Santayana, made a similar accusation against “the great philosophers who were mystics”: that they were “’malicious’ in regard to the world of science and common sense.” Bertrand Russell (2004), p. 15. In The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum also endorsed Nietzsche’s “deep and no doubt correct insight into a part of the appeal of Plato’s arguments,” the insight that the Platonic “ascent” is motivated by ressentiment. Martha Nussbaum (1987/2001), p. 161. Nussbaum goes on to say that Nietzsche’s “insight” doesn’t do justice to the “complexity” of Plato’s arguments. She doesn’t make it clear whether those arguments would succeed without the alleged ressentiment. In her later Upheavals of Thought, Nussbaum similarly insisted that Plato’s “ascent strategy” in the Symposium is “a therapeutic program undertaken for reasons of health, because the strains of ordinary eros are too costly.” Martha Nussbaum (2003), p. 494, n. 16. In opposition to all of these allegations, I suggest that our wanting “the things that really are good” (Republic 505d), and thus to function fully as ourselves, is a sufficient explanation of the ascent in both dialogues, the Republic and the Symposium. (I’ll discuss the Symposium’s account of eros in Chapter 7.) These “masters of suspicion,” Nietzsche, Santayana, Russell, and Nussbaum, who seek to liberate us from the illusions of idealism, have in fact obscured what idealism is about. The general issue of the contribution that thought and “ideas” can make to what we succeed in being, and thus to what the world as a whole succeeds in being, has unfortunately been the subject of widespread confusion since at least the nineteenth century. That what we succeed in being might contribute something to what the world as a whole succeeds in being, is no longer a familiar thought. Probably because intellect has come to be associated almost exclusively with science and technology, our understanding of its role in our life as a whole has been reduced to a stock of stereotypical and unrealistic images. We have, for example, the “rational man” who has no emotions, the “intellectual” who is preoccupied with ideas at the expense of actually living life, the “romantic” who has no interest in reason, and the “existentialist” who pursues projects that come out of the blue. Recent instances of this “existentialist” theme are Bernard Williams’s hypostatizing of what he calls “ground projects” in Williams (1986), and Richard Rorty’s proposal to “substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking and of social progress” in Rorty (1989) (p. xiii). Earlier instances are to be found in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Andre Gide. These writers are all centrally concerned with the goal of “being oneself” or being free, but none of them seem to appreciate what Plato, Plotinus, Kant, and Hegel have to say on this subject. Which is that thought that seeks truth and thus is less at the mercy of external influences than other human functions are, is consequently more free and more truly one’s “own,” and thus is the primary route to being truly oneself and free. That is, the pursuit of Truth is the primary route to real Freedom. Plato isn’t looking for people who have no emotions, or who are preoccupied with what we call “ideas,” and he’s certainly not looking for people who have no interest in reason or whose projects come out of the blue. Following Socrates’s principle that the unexamined life is not worth living (Apology of Socrates 38a), Plato is looking for people whose dominant concerns don’t obviously stem from some unexamined external influence. So that their lives may express in an important way themselves, their own processing, as distinct from their antecedents and environment. “Obey thyself,” as Emerson says. The vertical ascent is the dimension of oneself, of one’s own processing. It may not be easy to define precisely what this processing consists in. But everyone knows in practice the difference between simply acting on an appetite, an emotion, or a bright idea, or considering it with an uncommitted, open mind, so that one’s eventual decision is “all things considered.” This difference is what Platonism is about, and it’s what makes us fully real, as ourselves. By focusing on what’s needed in order for us to be fully real, as ourselves, Platonism shows us something crucial about reality in general which is ignored by accounts of reality which address only what’s “out there,” separate from the observing self. The crucial thing that such accounts ignore is the way in which an observing, thinking, and evaluating self enables a reality to govern itself and thus (as we say) to “be itself,” rather than just being the effect of its antecedents and environment. The self’s attention to itself, in Platonism, is not mere “navel-gazing,” as “practical” thinking might suspect. It brings to light a dimension of the physical universe, namely, its ability to achieve true self-government, which we can easily overlook when we’re engaged in our necessary efforts to understand and control what’s “out there,” separate from ourselves. The way in which the “self” or subject contributes to the physical universe’s achievement of reality “as itself” is the aspect of Platonism that’s spelled out most explicitly by German Idealism, and especially by Hegel in his study of how, as he puts it, “substance is essentially subject.” On Hegel’s doctrine that “substance is essentially subject” (Phenomenology of Spirit, Miller trans., §25; SuW 3:28), see Wallace (2005), pp. 88-90 and 224-228. Students of Platonism who appreciate the German Idealists may pick up important aspects of Plato that others might miss. When Eric Perl, for example, asserts as a fundamental principle for Plato that “the intellect by nature demands to see goodness in its object in order to understand, to make sense of it,” I imagine that many admirers of natural science would probably dismiss this statement as simple dogmatism. Eric Perl (2007), p. 8. Whereas when Plato himself states (in Phaedo 99c, which Perl quotes here) that those who give merely mechanical accounts of nature “think that, truly, the good and the right do not bind and hold anything together,” Plato alludes to the phenomenon that he explores in detail in Republic books iv-vii: that an interest in the Good can “bind something together” in the clear sense that it enables that thing to be guided by its own thinking and not merely by external inputs. Chapter 2 of Schindler (2008) surveys numerous attempts to explain the relation that Plato is driving at, between goodness and truth. Unlike Schindler and the other commentators he surveys, I rely on Plato’s account in Republic books iv-vii of how the pursuit of goodness produces unity (443e), and thus (one might say) full reality or “truth,” in the soul. Having thus identified a higher degree of reality, reality as itself, Plato like Aristotle and Hegel can then quite reasonably understand other forms of life as approximating in varying degrees to this higher degree of reality. —How Knowledge in the Strongest Sense Is Knowledge of Self— Taking the reality that’s real “as itself” as the paradigm of full reality, Plato takes our knowledge of this kind of reality as the paradigm, also, of knowledge. The Forms, especially the Form of the Good but also the subordinate Forms, which enable things to be real as themselves by having a definite identity (“Square,” “Tree,” “Human Being,” and so forth), are therefore the proper objects of knowledge. Particular sense experiences convey knowledge only insofar as they have to do with a Form or Forms, and (to that extent) with a self-determining, self-governing reality. During the first half of the twentieth century, an empiricist position was influential in Anglophone philosophy (Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer) according to which knowledge is constructed out of “sense-data,” which are how the world affects us through our five senses. Criticism of this notion by philosophers including W.V.O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars eventually made it clear that excitations of sense organs, as such, contain no knowledge, because no quantity of sense organ excitations, as such, would be sufficient to say something about the world. “Sense-data” theories: Bertrand Russell (1912/1997); A.J. Ayer (1956). Criticisms: W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1953), Wilfrid Sellars (1956/1997), John McDowell (1994), and Sebastian Rödl (2012). Hegel had given a similar critique, in the first chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in response to Immanuel Kant’s dualism of “intuition” and “concept” in his CPuR (1781/1787).The critique of empiricism that Hegel, Quine, Sellars, McDowell, and Rödl carry out makes Plato’s emphasis on intellect as opposed to sensation as our access to the one real world seem quite reasonable. Everything that we can speak of is intelligible, so our access to it is through intellect; and its intelligibility (the Forms) is in it, in some fashion. As Sebastian Rödl points out, When I say ‘This is an apple’ and only see the front of the apple, then what I say goes beyond what I see. It includes the back, which I do not see. Therefore it is possible that I walk around the ostensible apple and discover that there is no apple. Now, no sum of perceptions can exclude that later perceptions will show that despite appearances there is no apple. Like a general judgment, the judgment ‘There is an apple’ goes beyond everything that we will ever have perceived. … If what is sensibly given in itself falls under the category of substance … then empirical knowledge always already contains general knowledge, which therefore is not inferred inductively from the former. (Rödl [2012], pp. 12-13) The category of “substance” (ousia, “being”) can’t be based on sense perception alone. Like “Square,” “Tree,” “Human Being,” and “Apple,” the concept of a “Substance” can’t be reduced to any number of actual or possible sense perceptions. This is the same point that I made above about mathematics: There is something at work here that can’t be reduced to sensations. This is one important consideration that led Plato to his notion of “Forms.” But in placing the Form of the Good above all other Forms (Republic 509b), Plato had an additional consideration in mind, namely, that humans, apples, and other substances can be more or less successful in being the substances that they are. For we humans, at any rate, pursue the Good more at some times than we do at other times. Insofar as we do this, we’re more “ourselves” and more human, by fulfilling human capacities, at some times than at others. There is thus a scale of degrees of reality, degrees of embodiment of the relevant Form, at least in ourselves. And in this way we can see that the Forms play a guiding role in a world that follows them to some degree, and to some degree fails to follow them. Plus, as before, we can interpret the hierarchy of life, from plant to human, as fulfilling in lesser and greater degrees the Form of the Good and thus the Form (as it were) of self-determination, of being fully oneself. Of course from a mechanistic point of view, such an interpretation of life would be highly suspicious. But when one has seen the Good’s relevance, in the human case, to self-determination and thus to being real as oneself, nothing is more natural than to extend this thought to life as a whole. (I’ll say more about this “teleological” view of reality in Chapter 8.) Our acquaintance with cases in which we seem to lack interest in the Good, and with cases in which the world seems to lack interest in the Good, are then something less than full “knowledge,” since their object isn’t what’s fully real. Full knowledge is only of what’s fully real, by being real as itself. Of course, the issue isn’t about how the word, “knowledge,” should be used. The issue is about what we should recognize as most real, and about our access to that. When we recognize a vertical dimension and a “higher,” more fully “real” world within the familiar world, words like “reality” and “knowledge” take on a stronger meaning than they have in the “flat” world that we moderns normally think we inhabit. And since our experience of ourselves is a primary instance of this higher reality, our ability to know it is assured. We know it, as I’ve said, “from inside.” For further illumination of Plato’s distinctive account of knowledge, see Lloyd Gerson (2003) and (2012). I suspect that the notion of a faculty of anamnesis, or “recollection,” which Plato introduces (Meno 81-86, Phaedo 72-76) as a means by which we could gain access to the Forms (which we might have known directly before we were born), is also, in effect, directed at who or what we ourselves really are when we’re distinguished from what our embodied experience has made us. —Hans Blumenberg’s Critique of Plato’s Conception of Knowledge— The account of Plato’s conception of knowledge that I’ve been outlining enables us to reply to Hans Blumenberg’s skeptical suggestion that Plato’s conception imposes an “excessive demand” on us. Hans Blumenberg, “An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric” (1987), p. 431/“Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik,” in his (1981), p. 107. We can reply that what Plato “demands” is simply what follows from our interest in being in charge of our own lives, so that it’s difficult to imagine a self-conscious life that doesn’t seek to meet Plato’s demand in some way. The fundamental question isn’t, as Blumenberg suggests, the question whether humans are constitutionally “poor” or, alternatively, “rich” Blumenberg, “Anthropological Approach,” p. 429/”Anthropologische Annäherung,” 104. through access to definitive “evidentness.” Blumenberg, “Anthropological Approach,” pp. 432, 455/”Anthropologische Annäherung,” pp. 107, 133. Our actual “riches,” this much is evident to us, are in our capacity to be in charge of our lives by seeking what’s true and what’s truly good. This is the crucial Platonic claim, which underlies and motivates “Ur-Platonism’s” rejection of doctrines such as materialism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism, which make it difficult to see how we could be in charge of our lives. “Ur-Platonism,” again, is Lloyd Gerson’s coinage in his (2013), p. 10. Blumenberg’s extensive discussion in his Höhlenausgänge (1996), Part II, of Plato’s image of the exit from the cave doesn’t mention Plato’s premise, articulated in Republic book iv, that “everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here” (505e). Which is clearly the motive for ascent from the shadow world to the higher realities. Nor does Blumenberg refer to Plato’s theme of the unification of the soul (443e), and how ascent, through this unification, enables the soul to be self-governing rather than governed by what’s other than itself. Blumenberg understands Plato’s “parts of the soul” only in terms of hierarchy (Höhlenausgänge [1996], p. 123), and not in terms of the soul’s potential for unity and, thus, self-government. Failing to notice these Platonic connections (that we want what really is good, and that by pursuing it we can be self-governing and whole), Blumenberg comes to the drastic conclusion that Plato recognized that he would have to use force to motivate anyone to leave the shadow world (pp. 87-89, 751). Blumenberg doesn’t consider the possibility that Plato’s references to force and compulsion (515c) are not meant to imply that we have no motive to leave the cave, but rather that the motive that we do have has to overcome our powerful habitual attachment to appetites, opinions, and self-importance, which are represented by the shadows on the wall of the cave. I’ll say more about this struggle below and in the next chapter. It’s the “identity crisis” that I’ve been talking about all along, and which Blumenberg like many post-Hegel philosophers does not get into focus. Nor does Blumenberg consider the possible relevance of Plato’s images of “birth in beauty” (Symposium 206c-e) and of Socrates as midwife (Theaetetus 150b), which together with the principle that “everyone wants the things that really are good” suggest ways in which departure from the shadow world might be more internally motivated than it appears in Republic vii. I’ll discuss these other images in Chapters 7 and 8. A more comprehensive account of Plato’s texts can help us to avoid being misled by peculiarities of his presentation in the Republic. Blumenberg’s drastic conclusion, resulting from his neglect of Plato’s principle and of texts outside the Republic, limits what he can accomplish in what is otherwise a uniquely wide-ranging and perceptive account of “exits from the cave” in western philosophy and culture. —This Knowledge Subsumes Body Within Soul— By showing us how the soul that unifies itself by seeking truth and the truly good is more fully itself and (in that sense) more fully real than what’s governed merely by its relations to its antecedents and environment, Plato shows us how bodily mechanisms can’t claim to be the fullest reality. He spells this out in the passage in the Phaedo about how the truly good “binds and holds” things together. There Socrates objects to Anaxagoras’s apparent materialism, in which he made no use of Mind, nor gave it any responsibility for the management of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things. That seemed to me much like [saying] that the reason that I am sitting here is because my body consists of bones and sinews, [and neglecting] to mention the true causes, that, after the Athenians decided it was better to condemn me, for this reason it seemed best to me to sit here and more right to remain and to endure whatever penalty they ordered. … Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause…. [They] do not believe that the truly good and “binding” binds and holds them together. (98b-99c) Plato’s point is that when we see how the pursuit of the Good unifies Socrates as a self-governing agent, we can no longer see air and ether and bones and sinews as the determining realities here. (The same thought would apply, in our day, to hormones, neurons, neurotransmitters, and so forth.) Rather, these material mechanisms are subsumed in a higher unity that’s more real insofar as it’s more self-governing. In this way, the doctrine of a dimension of lesser and greater degrees of reality shows us how to escape the perennial debates between materialism and mind/body dualism, both of which fail to see how a more self-governing whole both includes and surpasses material mechanisms. Tying the philosophy of mind together with the philosophy of will and freedom, Plato’s doctrine of degrees of reality points to a single underlying issue that generates most of our ongoing confusion in these areas. This notion of the self-governing higher degree of reality, which is adumbrated here in the Phaedo and elaborated in Republic books iv-vi, puts in a different light both the Phaedo’s earlier remarks about “despising” bodily pleasures and adornments, and Plato’s various quasi-mythical stories about the soul’s non-bodily itinerary (Phaedo 107-114; Republic 514-517, 614-621). We have good reason to think of the soul as more real than the body, insofar as it’s more self-governing and thus more real as itself. And as a result it can be appropriate to think of the soul as making “journeys” that the body, as such, can’t make—journeys, in particular, toward greater self-understanding and corresponding self-government. As in the “hero’s journey” and the “soul’s journey to God.” But these should not be understood as taking place in a space that resembles the one in which bodily journeys take place. They are allegories—“stories,” as Plato says. The “distance” that is covered in these stories, and their other features, represent inner processes of learning and thus becoming more real. Through his account of the “higher” dimension of self-government, Plato opens up what we’ve subsequently come to describe as the “inner” world of thought, self-discovery, and the divine. —Higher Degree of Reality Is a Simpler Solution than Heidegger’s— In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953/1961), Martin Heidegger tells us that it was common in his day to contrast Platonic “idealism” with Aristotelian “realism,” and to describe Parmenides’s Fragment 5 (sic) (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai [“for the same thing can be thought as can be”]) as having the result, also thought to be operative in German Idealism, that “everything becomes subjective. Nothing is in itself” (p. 115). This Parmenides fragment, which has been translated in very different ways, is listed as Fragment 3 in G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, eds. (1969), p. 269. Heidegger himself thought he saw an early instance of this kind of “subjectivity” in Plato’s notion of the true as idea, Form or “idea” (pp. 150-153), so that Plato was already putting us on the “idealism”/”realism” seesaw by which modern philosophy has been plagued. And Heidegger consequently tried at some length to show how we could avoid that seesaw by developing a more “authentic” understanding (p. 116) of Parmenides’s principle than Plato possessed. However, Heidegger didn’t notice how the ascent to “ideas,” in Plato, enables the “subject” to be self-governing and thus real as itself, so that Platonic “idealism” precisely does not render everything “subjective” in contrast to “objective,” but rather shows how the subject can surpass that contrast by achieving a kind of reality (namely, self-government and the resulting reality “as itself”) that “objects,” taken merely as such, can’t possess. It’s not difficult to interpret Parmenides’s principle as suggesting something like this, if by “einai” in it we understand the full reality of what is real as itself. Proceeding in this way, Plato (and Hegel too, following Plato) surpassed the contrast of “subject” with “object” in which, as Heidegger correctly observed, much modern philosophy is chronically entangled. And they did so without having to replace or radically reinterpret much of the vocabulary of Greek and modern philosophy, as Heidegger thought he needed to do. —And this Reality, Knowledge, and Subject/Object Unity Depend upon Value— Besides going beyond the familiar subject/object and “idealism”/”realism” seesaw, Plato’s doctrine of a higher degree of reality unifies another major dualism. By showing the role of the pursuit of what’s truly good in bringing about the fuller reality of self-government, Plato shows that value, the Good, is an integral aspect of reality itself. The soul that seeks what’s truly good, and not just whatever it’s presently drawn to, is thereby able to govern itself rather than being a product merely of whatever produced its current urges and opinions. And what governs itself appears to be real in the strongest sense, by being real as itself. But in that case, value (what’s truly good) plays an integral part in making what’s real in the strongest sense, real. The pursuit of the Good gives full reality to what has full reality. Which means that “fact” and “value,” or the “is” (as it’s often put) and the “ought,” aren’t independent of each other. What’s most real, what most “is,” depends upon its pursuit of value, or the “ought,” to be what it is. And likewise value, or the “ought,” will be found in what most “is.” The separation of “ought” from “is” is a characteristic feature both of empiricism (see David Hume [1978], pp. 468-9) and of Kantian thinking. I will say some more about the contrasting “teleological” view of life and reality, for which “ought” and “is” are intimately entwined, in Chapter 8. I discuss Hegel’s version of this entwinement, which is most evident in his account of the “ought” and the infinite, in chapter 3 of Wallace (2005), and in “Reality and Value in Hegel’s Broadly Platonic Idealism” (forthcoming). This may be the single most important way in which Platonism challenges the conception of reality that dominates most of our present-day thinking. We assume that if anything can tell us about what’s “real,” it’s the natural sciences; and that our experiences of value-clarification, freedom, love, and ecstasy, on the other hand, tell us nothing about what’s real, but at most about what we “feel” or “value.” But Plato and his followers including Hegel show how what’s real as itself, and thus arguably more fully real than anything else, becomes so only through its pursuit of what’s really good. So value, what’s really good, plays an indispensable role in the genesis of what’s most real. Insofar, then, as the natural sciences ignore the question of what’s really good, they can’t be the final arbiters of what’s real. They give us only a part of the answer to that central question. This is, once again, the issue of whether reality is merely “horizontal,” a feature that things either have or they don’t, or it also has a “vertical” dimension, whereby some things are more real than others. Modern thinking in general assumes that reality is something that things either have or they don’t. Platonism, on the other hand, argues that we need to recognize a “vertical” dimension, a way in which some things are more real than others, though the others do have a degree of reality (they “are and are not”). And the things that are more real achieve this through their pursuit of what’s truly good, as opposed to whatever they may be naturally programmed to pursue. So that the fullest reality, the vertical dimension, depends entirely upon value. And, at the same time, value depends entirely on the fullest reality. Not on what we currently want, nor on what we “would” want under “ideal conditions” (whatever those might be), nor on what we receive through some special “faculty,” but on what gives us the most reality. So that everything that we learn about our own functioning in relation to the world contributes to our understanding of value in ourselves and the world, and vice versa. This value is transcendent insofar as our fullest reality transcends our lower aspects, and it’s immanent insofar as our fullest reality is what we contribute to the world. This dual Platonic thesis is intimately tied up with our daily experience, in which we move, through the absence or presence of inner freedom, from being less fully ourselves to being more so, and vice versa. This is how Platonism is an account of what human experience shows us about reality, and not merely an account of entities (“Forms”) that, if they’re thought of as “separate,” could be remote (as Blumenberg and others allege) from our experience. Without the Platonic insight into the role of inner freedom and value in constituting our own fullest reality and the world’s fullest reality, we have no satisfactory way of understanding ethics or the mind/body relationship, and we’re stuck in incessant battles between “horizontal” materialism or naturalism and rationally unsatisfactory versions of transcendence. Hopefully the interest, which is so widespread today, in experiencing inner freedom and transcendence, will eventually lead people back to the tradition from Plato to Hegel which explains what inner freedom and transcendence are, and how they’re fully rational. Then, in conducting our lives together, we’ll be able to draw simultaneously on all of our relevant kinds of experience, religious, ethical, scientific, and (indeed) aesthetic, because we’ll see how the essence of each is compatible with that of the others. And we’ll have the full benefit of the Platonic tradition, which is always available to us but to which for long periods we often manage to be rather deaf. —So This Reality Is what True Learning and True Education Will Be About— Closely tied up with the question of what’s real and how we can know it, is the question of the nature and methods of education and what priorities individuals and societies should have for it. Plato makes it clear that true learning—namely, learning that’s about the fullest reality, and contributes to it—is not an acquisition of information about external states of affairs. Since it’s learning about what makes oneself fully functional and real in oneself, it’s primarily “subjective” and internal—though useful things can be said about it from a more external perspective, as Plato tries to do. Plato says in Republic vii that the essential first step to gaining this knowledge involves “turning the whole soul” (518c) from everyday concerns to a concern with the true good. This “turning” may be the first description, in western literature, of what has subsequently (though often in a narrower, exclusively “religious” sense) been described as the experience of “conversion.” Seen as part of Plato’s big picture in Republic iv-vii, this turning takes us from a “horizontal” world in which all realities are equal—equally shadows on the wall of the cave—to a vertically-organized world in which some realities are more self-governing, more themselves, and in that sense more real than others. In this way, it creates (one might say) the “self” itself, as something that’s more internal and more fully itself than the “dependently co-arising” shadows. Plato seems rather ambivalent about the prospects for bringing about this turning and this self. On the one hand he speaks pretty drastically in Republic vii of “compelling” a person (515c) (the phrase that Blumenberg emphasizes), and of “hammering” on the soul “from childhood,” so as to “free it from the bonds of kinship with becoming, which have been fastened to it by feasting, greed, and other pleasures” (519a). On the other hand he has Socrates describe himself in the Theaetetus as a “midwife” (150b) and in the Symposium as one who promotes what Diotima calls “birth in beauty” (206c-e). These more organic processes of emergence, in which the teacher only assists, are consistent with the thought that what is essentially internal wouldn’t, in any case, be something that can be brought about from outside. Plato’s apparent progress from the external images of compelling and hammering to the more internal images of birth and midwifery is completed by Plotinus who places the emphasis entirely “within” when he describes God as being within us (Enneads V.I.11). Such comprehensive accounts of education in Plato as Robert E. Cushman (1958), and Rashana Kamtekar, “Plato on Education and Art” (in Gail Fine, ed. [2011]), unfortunately don’t consider “birth in beauty” and midwifery as suggesting an alternative account of how the necessary “turning” can take place. This latter view of the most important kind of education, which sees it as coming from inside and receiving only assistance from outside, has been developed by modern writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey and fits well with the thought of the German Idealists. To say that the most important kind of knowledge—in the strict sense, the only true knowledge, inasmuch as it relates to the only full reality—is internal and can’t be “put into” a person, is not to say, obviously, that the curricular content that we ordinarily call “knowledge” is insignificant. Nor is it to say that a society can’t support and encourage the pursuit of the most important, internal kind of knowledge. We are fortunate that our culture does contain traditions, particularly centered around psychology, literature, education, and religion, that have a considerable awareness of this most important kind of knowledge. I suspect that most of these traditions have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Plato. I’ll discuss Plato’s quite inegalitarian political suggestions in the next chapter. The process of facilitating the emergence of free selfhood clearly needn’t take place exclusively or even primarily in schools. Besides Socrates, Plato, Rousseau, and John Dewey, some recent advocates of education as facilitating the emergence of free selfhood are A.S. Neill, Paulo Freire, John Holt, and Ivan Illich. —The Vertical Dimension in Human Personalities— To see how concerned Plato was with issues of education as liberation, it’s useful to look at some of the numerous “case studies” (as we might call them) or portraits that Plato presents in his dialogues. They make it very clear that he must have developed his account of the “parts of the soul” in part through close observation of individual human personalities. Euthyphro, in the dialogue that bears his name, claims to be, and is proud to be, an expert on the gods. But he isn’t able to explain what makes one action godly and another ungodly. Blithely confident that it’s perfectly godly to take his father to court, as he is doing, for letting a servant die—no false “family piety” for Euthyphro—his primary motive seems to be self-congratulation, and we’re bound to wonder how he got to be this way. Plato’s picture of Euthyphro suggests that a person who is preoccupied with what he takes to be his own outstanding virtues, and is bothered by none of the doubts that ordinary people might feel, is governed by a need that he doesn’t understand. A comic figure in his one-sidedness, Euthyphro is, in effect, a puppet of this unexamined force of self-importance that’s at work in him. He shows us how there is nothing highfalutin’ about Socrates’s prescription of self-examination; it is a precondition of everyday human wholeness. A person who can’t effectively examine his own motives is at the mercy of what he can’t examine, and thus can’t be fully in charge of his life. A second example: Thrasymachus, in Republic book i, is proud of what he takes to be his independent thinking, exhibited in his convictions that justice is power and tyrants are admirable. But when he tries to defend these ideas, it becomes clear that they aren’t the result of much real thought. Falling back on ridicule, he makes it clear that his convictions reflect emotional investments—probably a need to feel important—more than cognitive investments. Thrasymachus apparently lacks a sense of his own power, and seeks to bolster himself by braggadocio, bluster, and aggressiveness. This lack of a sense of his own power, a lack of which he clearly has no understanding, motivates the main lines of his behavior. So one can hardly say that his behavior expresses himself, except in the sense that it shows how little effective “self” he possesses. Like Euthyphro, he is at the mercy of motives that he doesn’t understand and can’t control. But Plato’s prize example of inner disunity is always Alcibiades, the handsome, brilliant, and charismatic young leader who says in the Symposium that Socrates makes him ashamed of his way of living, but he can’t help living that way. I have heard Pericles and many other great orators, and I have admired their speeches. But … they never upset me so deeply that my very own soul started protesting that my life—my life!—was no better than the most miserable slave’s. And yet that is exactly how [Socrates] makes me feel all the time…. Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame … yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd. (215e-216b) Alcibiades’s “desire to please the crowd” overrules his “very own soul”: this most gifted young man of his generation fails to enact what he himself takes to be good, and allows himself to be governed by what isn’t him. His actions are governed by a desire that he doesn’t understand well enough to be able to choose whether or not to follow it. So his “own soul” is present only in his shame, and not in his actions. Like Euthyphro and Thrasymachus, Alcibiades himself isn’t really in charge of his life. The Symposium’s narrator describes Socrates as maintaining, during the wee hours of the morning at the end of the party, that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy (223d). We might think that in his depiction of Alcibiades, Plato meets this standard very well. In the Symposium itself, Alcibiades is a charismatic reveler, a poetic story-teller, and a charmingly candid self-deprecator. Like Robin Williams, in our day, he has his audience in the palm of his hand. But as Plato’s readers all knew, the historical Alcibiades had come to a bad end and had taken the flower of Athenian youth with him, when the city’s military expedition to Syracuse, which Alcibiades had promoted, turned out to be a military disaster. Alcibiades was also suspected of having desecrated religious mysteries, during a late-night drinking spree, in a way that might have been thought to endanger Athens. These facts must have been in the foreground for Plato, as he wrote the Symposium, and for his readers. One has to suppose that if Alcibiades had had a better grasp of his own character and life, things would have turned out differently for him and for Athens also, in significant respects. So the light-hearted comedy that Plato shares with us in the Symposium opens, outside its frame, into an archetypal tragedy. Euthyphro, Thrasymachus, and Alcibiades all exhibit the more or less dramatic consequences of the all too familiar, all too human failure to be in charge of one’s own life. In the case of Alcibiades, this failure is all the more poignant because of the great gifts that Alcibiades clearly possessed. What “helpless immortals” these are, indeed! Does anyone in the dialogues have a successful life, one that expresses his true self rather than expressing external forces that he doesn’t understand or control? Evidently, Socrates does. Socrates exhibits no self-congratulation, no anger, shame, or desire to please anyone. Instead, his life expresses his own processing, and the people around him who aren’t blinded by anger at having their ignorance revealed by his examination are fascinated by this highly unusual phenomenon. In Socrates, we see what the pursuit of the Good, of the vertical dimension in which we become fully ourselves, can achieve. Plato was clearly aware of the painful irony that Socrates, who exemplifies self-realization in this exceptional way, was unable to help his beloved Alcibiades to get beyond his “desire to please the crowd” and get in charge of his own life. And the same is the case with many of Socrates’s other interlocutors. They dramatize the difficult fact that the impetus for self-realization has to come from within. But this doesn’t lead Plato to despair, since in Diotima’s speech (in the Symposium) and elsewhere he continues to hold up for us the possibility that when such an impetus is present, friends can be deeply helpful. It seems likely that Plato’s apparent confidence that friends can be helpful in this way, even though he gives us no extended case study of how this has happened in a particular person, is due at least in part to his own personal experience of interaction with Socrates. No doubt because of modesty on Plato’s part, we don’t know any details of what that interaction was like. But the fact that it apparently led Plato to make such an extended study of the process by which personal freedom can come about, gives us some idea of how important that experience must have been for Plato himself. From the care that Plato gives to describing Alcibiades and his other “case studies,” it’s clear that he is interested in freedom in all of its aspects. There is no such thing for him as “mere psychology,” as opposed to philosophy. Nor is there “mere literature,” though his studies of the personalities that I’ve mentioned seem to me to amount to one of the first and greatest novels in western literature. The next chapter will examine in more detail what Plato shows us about freedom, and it will also say something about his well-known ambivalence about political freedom and democracy. 2