Plato: Introduction
Plato and the Axial Age.
Christians look on the coming of Jesus as a “turning point” in human history, and created a dating system, dividing world-history into “b.c.” and “a.d.” based on this idea. Philosopher Karl Jaspers proposed an idea that broadened this concept to cover developments in several other cultures as well, which represented similar “turning points” in the history of these cultures, independent of each other though happening in a similar time-frame: Confucianism and Daoism in China, classical Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Socrates and Plato in Greece, the Hebrew prophets and Jesus in the middle East. He called this the “axial” period in human history.
This is a era when significant numbers of people ceased to feel at home in the world, developed fundamental critiques of conventional norms prevailing in their societies, and oriented their lives toward some “transcendent” realities. In the Christian case, for example, people should not judge themselves by how they look in the eyes of any human community, but how they look in the eyes of God.
For Plato, transcendent reality took the form of otherworldly ideals of human excellence that transcend the world in the purity and perfection of their Goodness. Rather than judge herself by worldly standards, the ideal Platonist takes these transcendent excellence-ideals as models to mold her character on, and takes her ability to approximate these ideals as what finally matters in life. “Excellence” is a better translation of Plato’s Greek term arete, more commonly translated as “virtue.” Because “virtue” is the more common translation, I will often use the term virtue in these essays.
What is unique about Platonism among all other axial movements is that Plato’s writings provide a rational method of arriving at well-founded knowledge of these transcendent otherworldly excellence ideals. This is a method that begins with everyday human perceptions representing some particular kind of goodness in an imperfect form, and proceeds by a series of reason-based refinement-steps to raise a person’s mind to the highest and most perfect representations of this kind of goodness.
I focus entirely on Plato’s thought about virtue.
This focus on reason-based knowledge of pure and perfect excellence-ideals is an unusual approach to Plato-interpretation today. Among current philosophers, predominant approaches today regard Plato’s theory of transcendent excellence-ideals as just one facet of a larger theory constituting “Platonist metaphysics,” an interpretation which results in a widespread dismissal of Platonism today because metaphysics in general has fallen into disrepute. (As a recent president of the American Philosophical Society once said “No one wants to be called a Platonist.”)
I agree with this assessment of Plato’s alleged metaphysics, which I think cannot be supported by good reasons that we today can continue to regard as good reasons.
My recent book on Plato attempts to rehabilitate Platonism by focusing entirely on Plato’s theory of transcendent ideals of ethical excellence, a theory which I think can be supported by reasoning methods found in Plato’s writings themselves. I call this approach a “critical reconstruction” of Plato’s thought, dismissing those ideas found in Plato’s writings that I think can no longer be supported with good reasons, and “reconstructing” his thought on a “critical” rational basis. This critical reconstruction still leaves intact what is personally and existentially challenging about Platonism, revealing the insufficiencies of life lived by ordinary “worldly” standards, and calling us to raise our lives to a higher level.
Many readers will note the somewhat unusual sense I give to the term “transcendence” here. To “transcend” is to “go beyond,” so its meaning depends on what is to be transcended. Very often today, “transcendence” is often associated with belief in beliefs in some allegedly universal and timeless truths that “transcend” cultural diversity and historical change, and so are are authoritative for everyone everywhere. Plato is often associated with this kind of claim, which I myself think cannot be supported by good reasons today. What I think can be supported is Plato’s claim to have a rational means of arriving at excellence ideals that “transcend the world” in the perfection of their goodness, which is the meaning I give to “transcendence” in these essays. Since I also think that there exist a potentially limitless array of kinds of human excellence, represented by many different concepts prevalent in many different cultures, and a perfect Platonic Form of each, this repudiates the idea of one set of excellence ideals which are the only set valid for everyone who wants to strive for excellence.
A Platonist Approach to other Axial-Age movements.
Part of my plan for this website is also to take these Platonist ideas as a basis for a critical reconstruction of the teachings of a few other axial movements which I have been able to study in some depth from this perspective. Early Buddhism, for example, arose among “alienated” individuals who had already become dissatisfied with ordinary family and social life, had “left home for homelessness,” to search for an ideal way of being “surpassing the normal ways of humans” as they said. Nibbana (Nirvana) is the name they gave to the ideal which they claim to have found. I attempt a reason-based critical reconstruction of Nibbana as a transcendent ideal, treating it on the Platonist model of a world-transcending ideal of a particular kind of human excellence.
This approach to the study of various religious classics that have come down to us from the axial age is the basis for a radically pluralist view of the traditions represented. Unlike many who think that there is some underlying unity to what appear to be diverse teachings of various religious traditions, I think that this diversity goes all the way down. There are an indefinite number of kinds of human excellence, each different from the other, and a perfect Platonic Ideal of each. Buddhist Nibbana is the perfection of a certain kind of human excellence, very different from the kind of excellence central to the worldviews of axial-age Daoism, axial-age Hinduism, and axial-age Christianity.
Outline of Essays in this Plato Section
Intellectual aspects of this approach are described in some detail in two essays “Critical Reconstruction: A Different Approach to Plato” and “Plato on World-Transcending Virtue-Forms” the main points of which are further summarized below.
A second distinctive aspect of my writings on Plato illustrated in some essays in this section stems partly from my own attempts over 30+ years to teach college undergraduates how Socratic reasoning and Plato’s thought about virtues might be relevant to their own lives, partly also from my own attempts to personally and vicariously imagine what it might be like to try to live life as Plato’s ideal philosopher described in Chapters 5-7 of his Republic. This brought me to try to develop more conceptual clarity about Plato’s thought on relevant topics, and also to think more of concrete examples illustrating more clearly how certain basic aspects of Socratic reasoning and Plato’s thought about virtue might look if applied to life in the modern world.
Socratic Reasoning about Virtue
First, I tried to boil down the basic principles of a reasoning process that I could give to students as a writing assignment, which would begin with Socratic questioning-by-counterexample, and plausibly lead ultimately to the formulation of virtue-concepts representing some kind of goodness rationally known to be pure, precise, an unambiguous descriptions of something only and always perfectly good. The results are two essays included here. One is “Principles of Socratic Reasoning” describing in clear terms the principles of Socratic reasoning, as well as more detailed descriptions of how to conduct a Socratic discussion of some particular virtue. Another “5. Sample Discussion of the Virtue of Humility. illustrates this reasoning method by a long “Socratic” discussion of the virtue of humility.
What is a Virtue?
In the essay “6. What is a virtue? I present my own attempts to clarify what exactly a virtue consists in, as well as some suggestions as to what it might mean to cultivate some particular virtue. A final section of this essay “How many virtues are there?” introduces an idea that runs contrary to many modern versions of what “Platonism” stands for. That is, Platonism today is very often identified with the idea of universal timeless truths that transcend all cultural diversity and historical change. In the case of virtues, this implies that there is only one relatively small set of virtues and a Platonic Form of each, and anyone from any culture who gets his head into the divine realm where these virtue-Forms would see exactly this same single set of Forms. Many are attached to this idea because in their minds abandonment of this idea of universal timeless truths can only result in skeptical “relativism.” In this part of my essay, I propose instead a “critical pluralism” about virtues.
“Pluralism” refers to our inability to establish a list containing a single set of virtues, and prove by reasoning that there can be no genuine virtues existing outside this list. This pluralism allows in principle for the existence of an indefinite number of virtues and a Platonic Form describing what each would be at its most perfect.
“Critical” refers to the fact that not just any virtue-concept qualifies as a perfect Platonic virtue-Form. Only those virtues qualify which are able to withstand serious and sustained Socratic questioning by counterexample.
Intellectual and Philosophical Bases for Plato-Interpretation
To understand my approach to the more intellectual and philosophical aspects of Plato’s thought, I think it is necessary to keep in mind the practical purpose of his thought on virtue. Here it is necessary to at least vicariously and temporarily put oneself in the position of a very idealistic person, very engaged in the personal ambition to “become his best,” as Plato puts it. This must always be kept in mind as the practical purpose of Plato’s thought about virtue or arete (against the tendency of modern philosophers to conceive of their task on the model of disengaged and impersonal “scientific” inquiry).
It is not however, that Plato is concerned with practical means of becoming more virtuous. He offers very little in the way of useful ideas for this purpose.
He is concerned mainly with a purely intellectual problem, how to resolve some fundamental problems that are the basis of moral skepticism, the seeming lack of any reasoning method that would overcome these problems and lead to a knowledge of what human goodness consists in that can be shown to rest on a solid rational foundation.
Fundamental moral skepticism of course has become since the Enlightenment also a modern problem. I think Plato did find a solution to the kinds of moral skepticism that show up in his writings. The two cornerstones of this solution consist in ways of framing the problem in two particular ways that run completely contrary to assumptions underlying most modern moral philosophy.
Our Perceptions Have Ethical Content
First, modern moral philosophy generally operates with a concept of human perception in which what these perceptions tell us consists only in bare “facts,” devoid of any ethical content (the basis of the distinction between “facts” and “value”). This precludes the possibility of any “empirical” basis for moral reasoning.
By contrast, the model of Socratic reasoning presented in some of Plato’s dialogues depends on the commonsense assumption that our perceptions of moral goodness or lack thereof in concrete cases (aistheseis in Plato’s Greek) do have ethical content, and are a reliable source of knowledge of true goodness. This makes possible what we would call an empiricist model of reasoning about ethics (while ever since Kant, Plato has been classed on the “rationalist” side of the divide between empiricist and rationalist philosophers).
The Desired Outcome of Ethical Reasoning: Virtue vs. Behavioral Rules
Secondly, most modern moral philosophy operates with the assumption about the desired outcome of moral reasoning; that what reasoning is ultimately about are normative moral principles or rules deciding what kind of behavior is morally good or not good.
Plato actually holds a radically skeptical view of this assumption. Sustained practice of Socratic questioning will show that, while our perceptions of what is good/not-good in cases of concrete behavior constitutes the ultimate evidentiary basis of ethical reasoning, attempts to define goodness itself in terms of concrete, externally observable behavior will always result in definitions that are ambiguous with respect to true goodness. In the case of any such behaviorally oriented rules, it is inevitable that following such a rule in every situation will sometimes lead to behavior that is perceptibly good, but also sometimes lead to behavior that our perceptions will tell us is not good.
From a modern perspective, Plato’s solution to this problem is two-fold. First, he came to the view that this problem can only be resolved by abandoning the idea that goal of moral reasoning ought to be the determination of normative rules for concrete conduct. Precise and unambiguous definitions of any kind of goodness can only be achieved by definitions that are (to use a modern term) “abstract,” not tied to any descriptions of specific kinds of externally observable concrete behavior. The human habit of concrete-mindedness, thinking of goodness in terms of externally observable human behavior, is the main obstacle to be overcome if we want to gain pure and precise knowledge of goodness
The aspect of Plato interpretation relevant to these last points is presented in my essay From Socratic Questioning to Knowledge of “Divine” Platonic Virtue-Forms“, which consists mainly in a detailed textual analysis of the Greek text of relevant passages in chapters 5-7 of Plato’s Republic. (This chapter also includes a number of other Plato passages important to the present reconstruction of his thought about virtue-Forms, for example the Parable of the Cave, and the image of a mental ladder by which a person can make mental progress beginning from perceptions of imperfect concrete exemplars of virtue, and make gradual progress toward the highest abstract concept of what this virtue would be at its most perfect “divine” best).
Secondly, it is important to recognize that for Plato the goal of moral reasoning is non-concrete in a second sense: the goal is to develop ideal models of “virtue” (arete) that a person can use as models to mold his character on. A virtue is an internal character trait that will certainly manifest itself in concretely visible behavior when the situation calls for it, but in itself it is invisible from the outside. The essay ” What is a virtue? presents my own attempts to clarify in detail what a “virtue” consists in, as well as some suggestions about what it might mean to cultivate some particular virtues in oneself.
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