An Eye for An I. Robert Spillane
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it is difficult to see how one can know the Forms, which are by definition unreal because they are universals. Furthermore, how is it possible to talk about Forms? If we say that a painting is beautiful we imply that the painting partakes of the Form of Beauty. But if we say with Plato that the Form of Beauty is eternal, we seem to be saying that the Form of Beauty partakes of the Form of Eternity and this appears to mean that the Forms communicate with each other, which Plato denies. Socrates offers no convincing answers to Parmenides’ challenges but this is attributed to his insufficient education which, when improved, may enable him to save the theory of Forms. They have not been saved although they have been modified by generations of spiritualists and religionists.
Education is, for Plato, the noblest profession since it helps others climb the greatest of human heights. At the summit, people will understand the true meaning of moral concepts and so will have acquired wisdom through rational means. And since rational people are wise, they do not engage in evil intentionally. Accordingly, they should be the rulers of Plato’s ideal society, outlined in The Republic. Unlike Homer, who thought that the best warriors should be rulers, Plato prefers philosopher-kings, because they think rationally and act wisely. Warriors are well-trained but ill-educated. Rulers must be trained and educated: they must be philosophers.
Plato realises, however, that warriors are disinclined to accept their exclusion from rulership. In his attempt to address and correct this dilemma, Plato is led into an apparent paradox when he argues that since philosophers are those who love truth, rulers must nonetheless lie so that they may gain the acceptance of warriors and workers. He is adamant that it is the business of political rulers to tell lies and so deceive both its enemies and its own citizens for the benefit of the state and no one else must touch this privilege. If the citizens lie, the rulers must punish them for introducing a practice which injures and endangers the state. Plato goes even further and asks whether rulers could fabricate a single lordly lie with which they can persuade even the rulers themselves. The lordly lie is that some people are born to rule and this audacious lie has been accepted down the ages by rulers who see it as the perfect justification for legitimating power.
Around 1945, Karl Popper scandalised a large part of the philosophical world with his attack on Plato in The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper charged Plato with being the spokesman for a closed society ruled by totalitarian gangsters. He argued that, unlike Socrates, Plato compromised his integrity with every step he took. He was opposed to free thought and the pursuit of truth, and defended lying, superstition and brutal violence.
Plato may have been a defender of totalitarian politics but he also raised important philosophical questions which still exercise the imagination. What, for example, do we mean when we talk of ideal justice or ideal courage? Are these universals mere abstractions, nothing more than words? Or are we able in some imperfect way to come to an understanding that beyond the data of our five senses there is a world of perfection against which we judge ourselves and others? When we strive for excellence, what do we strive for? Is there some eternal, unchanging ideal standard of excellence which we dimly apprehend and which guides us through life? To be sure, only a few people can gain an imperfect appreciation of ideals, but does that invalidate their existence? Plato asks fascinating and important questions to which we still strive to find answers.
Plato believes that reason should guide and control the feelings which sabotage our quest for truth. If we are well-educated and pursue a rational approach to life, we will act wisely. We should have a physician of the body to cure our physical problems, and a physician of the ‘soul’ to cure our psychological problems. He seems to have invented ‘soul’ for the practical purpose of helping people live in truth. But in arguing that people who act irrationally are suffering from illnesses of the soul, he fathered the mental illness industry. Plato’s views, therefore, encourage those in power to act against individuals like Socrates because they are ‘mad’. He starts out lamenting the fate of Socrates but he ends with a philosophy which has encouraged totalitarians to incarcerate or kill those who argue against them, either by indicting them for a crime or by depriving them of their liberty by labelling them as mentally ill. This paradox worried Plato’s most famous pupil – Aristotle.
Aristotle was born in 384 BC in northern Greece. His father was court physician to the king of Macedon. At the age of 17 he studied at Plato’s Academy in Athens where he remained for 20 years until Plato’s death in 347 BC. He assumed that he would take over as head of the Academy but the job went to a justly forgotten opponent. He then worked for a philosopher-king in Sicily after which he tutored the youth who was to be known as Alexander the Great. Aristotle returned to Athens in 336 BC and founded his own academy – the Lyceum – discovered by archaeologists in 1996. Alexander’s unexpected death in 323 BC saw Aristotle, like Socrates before him, charged with impiety. Unlike Socrates, he prudently went into voluntary exile in order to prevent the Athenians from committing a second sin against philosophy. Sadly his exile took him away from his philosophical colleagues and he soon died at age 62 leaving an impressive body of work.
Close to Plato in many ways, Aristotle developed a theory of body, psyche and mind which informs his influential theory of ethics. He believed that philosophy begins with a sense of wonder before nature and concluded that the best and happiest people spend as much time as possible in philosophical activity, using their reason to govern their actions and thinking.
Aristotle is widely regarded as a philosopher of common sense: Plato diluted by common sense as Bertrand Russell quipped. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily. In contrast to the idealistic Plato he is more interested in scientific investigations. He is not as distrustful of the evidence of the senses as was Plato, preferring theories of the natural world to metaphysical speculation. While respecting Plato, he could not accept his eternal, unchanging world of Forms. Rather, he thought of the Forms as metaphors that distract us from the empirical study of the natural world and the relationships between people. Yet, he could not entirely abandon Plato from whom he took the view that reality lies in form.
He has two questions for Plato: (a) If the Forms are essences of things, how can they exist separated from things? (b) If they are the cause of things, how can they exist in a different world? Aristotle concludes that Plato’s theory of two worlds is an intellectual disaster and that Forms are not separate entities but are embedded in particular things. They are in the world, not separated from it. Consequently, they are singulars, not universals. Forms are in a body and matter is what is unique to the object. All trees have the same form but no two trees have the same matter. Aristotle is also critical of Plato’s inability to explain motion and change. Unsurprisingly, Plato regarded change as a feature of the perceived world and permanence as a feature of a transcendental world. Aristotle argues that Plato cannot account for the causal relationships between the two worlds. Indeed, this problem bedevils all two-world theories: how does one world interact with the other? Nor can Plato’s Forms account for motion and change since the former are timeless and spaceless. Having renounced them, Aristotle faces the problem of how to introduce notions of stability into his philosophy. His answer involves a distinction between actuality and potentiality. Matter and form are represented by potentiality and actuality, as we can see in the example of an acorn. The acorn’s matter contains the potentiality of becoming an oak tree which is the acorn’s actuality.
Nature is, for Aristotle, a teleological system which strives towards perfection (rather than towards Plato’s transcendental ‘Good’). He suggests that perfection must exist in the telos towards which things strive. This he calls the Prime Mover and it is the only thing in the universe with no potentiality: it is pure actuality. The nature of things consists of an innate tendency to develop in a certain direction that demands an external cause. The only unmoved mover is the Prime Mover which is immaterial and pure actuality and engaged in eternal thought: a pure mind whose only object of thought is itself.
When Aristotle returns to mere mortals he struggles mightily with the concept of psyche. In his way of thinking perfect precedes imperfect, so psyche is a product of the perfect mind. Psyche is, however, inseparable from the human body: psyche is form, body is matter. All the powers of psyche (except nous: the power of abstract thought) have bodily organs and he ridicules those who characterise psyche as immaterial. He argues against Plato’s widely-held view of psyche