Plato: The Realm of Ideas You’ve just read one of the most well-known philosophical writings of the last 2500 years, Plato’s Republic Book VII. I think it’s important that you read the selections of the philosophers’ writings and try to make sense of them yourself before reading the explanatory chapters. The first thing we do in my classes is, students are asked to go through the famous “Allegory of the Cave” and draw the cave as Plato describes it, both inside and outside. Did you bother to visualize it as you read? If not, I recommend you do so now before turning the page and seeing my illustration. After discussing the allegory, we will go on to discuss Plato’s broader “Theory of Ideas” and his metaphysical description of reality. We will then discuss what knowledge is for Plato, how we get it, and what it is for, and finally what the human self is in Plato’s philosophy. Before all of that, however, let’s keep our eye on the prize as it were: Nietzsche’s story of the history of philosophy, “How the True World Finally Became a Fable”. The first stage in the history of the idea of the True World is identified with Plato’s philosophy: 1. The true world—attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, “I, Plato, am the Truth.”) Nietzsche here explicitly names Plato at the outset of the story he is going to tell. Our interest is not in the person Plato, nor in praising or blaming him for the idea of the true world and the history of an error. Instead, we can use Nietzsche’s summary as a guide to reading and interpreting Plato’s thinking. What are the two main characteristics Nietzsche attributes to Plato’s True World? It is attainable and it is sensible. By “sensible” here Nietzsche does not mean accessible to the senses, to perception. As we will see, Plato makes it clear that that is precisely what his Theory of Ideas is not. Instead, Nietzsche here means “sensible” in the sense that Plato’s account of the True World ‘makes sense,’ it can be relatively easily understood and accepted. Though Plato would not be happy with this characterization, one might even be tempted to call the Theory of Ideas “common sense”. However, could there be a problem here? Plato’s thinking certainly wasn’t accepted as “common sense” when he wrote it. After all, Socrates, from whom Plato derived at least some of his basic ways of thinking, was executed for just how much his thinking, and his way of delivering it, went against the ‘sensibilities’ of his fellow Athenians. Could it be that, rather than being “common sense” in that sense, Plato’s thinking now seems relatively “simple and persuasive” precisely because it has been so influential for the nearly 2500 years of Western philosophy that has come after it? Could it be that Plato’s ideas only appear as “sensible” and “persuasive” as they do because, over the course of more than two millennia, they have turned into our common sense so that we are always already persuaded by them in advance? Nietzsche also claims that Plato’s idea of the True world is “attainable”. What does he mean here? Nietzsche is implying that, according to Plato, it is at least theoretically possible for one, through philosophical practice, to gain access to the True World and to live in it in ‘this’ life—provided one is “sage”, “pious”, and “virtuous” enough. There are two worlds, the True World and the apparent one, but they are not two different places. The True World is not some far off, magical land, it is right ‘here’. And living in it is not a matter of ‘where’ you live but of how you live. The wise, pious, virtuous man can ‘attain’ to the true world, he can live in it, he can become it. Plato lives in the true world, he is the true world. The true world is in him. Of course, Nietzsche could mean that Plato has discovered the truth and become one with it to such an extent that Plato’s understanding of things and the truth of things are indistinguishable, or he could mean that Plato is so deceived that he’s confused his ego, and his own perspective on the world, with the truth of the world itself. What we have here, according to Nietzsche, is the birth of the idea of the true world, of the philosophical distinction between how things seem to be and how they really are. Plato is at great pains to criticize “common sense”. He wants to show that the way everybody assumes the world to be, without really thinking about it, doesn’t actually make logical sense. He wants to convince people to think their way out of the everyday world in which they live and into the deeper or higher truth. The “Allegory of the Cave” gives an image, tells a metaphorical story, of this process of making one’s way out of the thoughtlessness of common sense and into the higher reality of the True World. Plato calls this True World the Realm of Ideas. CAVE DRAWING The Allegory of the Cave First, let’s just explain the levels of reality depicted by the cave allegory. We find ourselves chained in a dark cave facing a wall. We cannot move our bodies or even turn our heads and can only see the far back wall deep in the hollows of the cave. This is our metaphorical situation. We are unfree, chained, and restricted from using our true abilities. On the back wall of the caves there are shadows. These shadows—mere lifeless, colorless, fleeting surfaces of things—are all we have ever seen. Thus, as far as we know, they are all that exists. We take these shadows to be real things. We have no idea what’s going on behind our backs. We don’t even know that there is something we are missing. The shadows stand for things as we perceive them. And we believe things to be what we see. We say, “what you see is what you get.” In my class, I push my chair to the center of the room and ask the class what it is. “It’s a chair,” they say, confident that the world is the way it appears to them to be. Behind you, however, is a wall, and above the wall pass statues. A fire behind casts light in the direction of the statues, which in turn causes the shadows on the wall that you see. Now, imagine that you turn around. You would be blinded by the light of the fire. You wouldn’t even be able to see. You’d think there was something wrong with you, an aneurysm or something. You’d want to sit right back down and stare at the wall where you can see the shadows, the only things that make sense to you. The light you saw wouldn’t seem more real, it would seem all wrong. That first moment of beginning to know would be both painful and terrifying. But suppose you waited long enough for your eyes to adjust to the light. In that case, the statues would start to come into focus. They would look like the shadows you’d seen before, but more. They’d have solidity and dimension. Eventually you might realize that the shadows you’d seen before were just byproducts, mere copies, of these things. You’d think, “Now I know what’s real.” But if you ventured a little further out of the cave you’d discover the fire itself. Then you might realize that, not only does the fire cause the shadows by casting light on the statues, but in fact it makes the light and heat by which you can see the statues too and by which the statues were made. In that sense, both the shadows and the statues owe their existence to the fire. It is the fire itself which is the source of the reality of the statues as well as the lesser existence of the shadows. At this point you’d think you had things all figured out. You knew what was real. But what if you kept climbing? Imagine that first climb out of the cave and into the light of day, how blinding it would be! You wouldn’t be able to make out a thing. Your eyes would burn. You’d be forced to go back into the cave. But what if you tried climbing out again at night. Then it wouldn’t be so bright. It would be brighter than the fire in the cave, but if you were patient and committed you could start to see. Then you would see things in a whole new light. The things you’d see would have color and movement and life like you’d never seen underground. Of course, you are still most familiar with shadows, so probably the shadows of things would be the first thing you’d take to be real, then their reflections in water, which would have more color and character, but would still have the flatness you’re familiar with. Finally, however, you might become able to make sense of the things themselves. If so, you would understand that these are the cause of the reflections on the water and shadows on the ground, poor copies only, and also the models for the statues in the caves and thus the shadows that they cast—copies of copies of copies! And if you looked up you could eventually see the stars and moon and planets themselves, which cast the light and give the orientation by which you can see and navigate this new true world of things as they are. And, when the sun came out, the light it cast would illuminate all things and you would see them in their complete truth, discovering that it was this sun that gave the light and heat that not only made it possible to see the things of the world, but that gave the energy necessary for the very existence of those things, and that the fire in the cave was a mere imitation of the sun above. Then you would see that the whole world, all the way down to the deepest shadows in the cave are but byproducts of the sun and imitations of the things that it infuses and illuminates. Of course, you should never stare at the sun. Now, Plato tells us that despite the temptation to stay and hang out by the lake in the sun, we need to go back down into the cave. Why? To free others so that they might see the light too. But that’s not the whole reason. Most people just won’t be able to make the climb, to reach the outside world. But seeing as they live amongst shadows and statues, and that’s all they can hope for, wouldn’t it be good if we could make those statues, and thus the shadows, more like the things outside? Wouldn’t more accurate copies make the world inside the cave better? All of this is, of course, a metaphor for learning. The objects in and out of the cave correspond to the levels of our thinking. We can illustrate this learning with objects we know. In class I draw this on the board: I ask the class, “what do you see?” They always say it is a circle. I point out that what they see is actually some ink on a board (or, in your case, on paper). That is the analogue of the shadows on the wall. The circle, rather than being the ink, is the shape, not seen but thought, carved out by the ink. But is it a perfect circle? No, it’s not completely circular. Also, what color is the perfect circle? What size? The perfect circle has no color or size. It is not just that my circle is imperfect, but that the perfect circle is not the kind of thing that can appear to your senses. Rather, the perfect circle is the circle in your mind by which you judge whether any particular thing is more or less circular. But does that mean that the circle is only in your mind? Of course not, since we all have more or less the same idea of the perfect circle. The Idea of the perfect circle then, from which we all get our ideas in our heads of the perfect circle, transcends any particular circle. It is the circle itself that any particular circle is only an imitation of, as a statue is an imitation of a real thing. But is this idea of a circle in your head true knowledge of what a circle is? No, true knowledge of what a circle is means understanding what makes a circle a circle, the geometry by which we can, in advance know the truth behind any and every circle that will ever be. It may be difficult for you to accept the idea that ideas of things are more real than particular physical things, but have you ever taken time to examine what you mean by real? In class we look at the chair again. What is more real, I ask, the chair or the gray color of the chair? If you took the gray away (by painting it, for example) you would still have the chair, but if you took the chair away, would the gray still be floating there without it? Of course not, the grayness is a quality or characteristic of the chair. The chair is an independent thing, the color of it is dependent on the chair for its existence. Because of this the chair also does something else more than the grayness does. The chair takes up space and time, that’s what makes it real. The grayness takes up space and time too, but less space and less time: the color is only superficial and takes up less space than the chair. And the color not only fades over time, but changes depending on the lighting. Thus the color of the chair is less real than the chair because it is dependent on the chair and takes up less time and space than the chair. Taking up space and time and being independent are what make things real, the more they do so, the more real they are. But is the chair as real as it gets? The chair seems pretty permanent, but that’s a consequence of the limitation of your perspective. First, let’s note the failing in the answer “it’s a chair” I mentioned earlier. What you see is not the complete chair but only a glimpse of the total chair from a particular angle at a particular moment in a particular light. You don’t see other angles of the chair. You don’t see its full history, the years before you first glimpsed it and after you stop looking at it. You don’t see inside the chair. You have only a glimpse of the chair that, without thinking about it, you’ve taken for the chair itself. But obviously the chair itself is more than the glimpse you have of it, it is the cause of that glimpse, the glimpses of others, and all possible glimpses past and present whether someone actually sees them or not. The chair is more real than what you see of it. This chair that is more than your glimpse of it will last a long time, years. But sooner or later it will stop existing. Even as we speak the atoms that bombard it and the people that sit on it are slowly bringing about its destruction. And a few years ago it didn’t exist either. It only came into existence because a chairmaker, or the machines at a chair factory, brought it into existence. And they did so with the idea of making a chair. This chair is just as much one particular instance of a chair as your glimpse of it is one particular glimpse. It is a manifestation or appearance of the idea of a chair as such. When the chair is destroyed will the Idea of Chair be destroyed? Of course not. The Idea of Chair exceeds this or that chair, it does not depend on them, they depend on it. And this Idea of a Chair, where and when is it? Nowhere and never. And yet at the same time the idea of Chair appears any and every time there is a chair. The Idea of a chair can occupy many places and many moments, can take up much more space and time than any particular chair. But, as we saw, being independent and taking up time and space are what we mean by something’s being real and existing. So, the Idea of Chair actually has more existence and is more real than any particular chair—even every particular chair, since it is the basis of all possible as well as actual chairs. But why do chairs exist at all? Chairs exist in order to be sat on. Can we sit on other things? Sure we can. And why sit? To rest and relax our bodies, to free our minds from the work and pain of standing. And why free our minds? To think. And what do we need to think about? More important ideas than chairs—ultimately, how to live well. Thus, like the move from the shadows to the sun, the glimpse of the chair can lead us to the higher idea of wisdom. Sun and Stars The Good Wisdom Things Ideas Rest Reflections Ideas of Things Idea of a Chair Fire Sun Your mind Statues Things Particular chairs Shadows Appearances Glimpses The Analogy of the Line After the “Allegory of the Cave” Plato explains what has been named the “Analogy of the Line”. The line is an analogue for Plato’s theory of thinking or knowing. Plato says that all thinking can be divided into two parts: Opinion and Intellect. Opinion corresponds to inside the cave and Intellect corresponds to outside the cave. While the things inside the cave are copies of things outside the cave and ultimately get their being from them, they have no direct contact with the source of all being in the cave allegory, the Sun. In the same way, opinion has no direct connection to the truth, and to the other ideas that give things existence and meaning, though they are nevertheless ultimately mere copies, dependent on the higher ideas. Intellect, on the other hand, has some direct connection or access to the higher truths of the ideas themselves. LINE But, Plato explains, both Intellect and Opinion are divided again. Opinion is divided into Perception and Belief. Intellect is divided into Understanding and Science (or wisdom). In our time, what we call science is not what Plato has in mind by the term. The sciences would, according to Plato’s schema, count as understanding, not as Wisdom. This is because the sciences, explicitly and necessarily, exclude what Plato considers to be the true objects of what he calls Science, the higher values such as justice and virtue and beauty. The sciences, on the other hand, declare themselves to be ‘value-free’. The truths they discover are thus not, in Plato’s schema, the highest truths we can know. The objects of knowledge correspond to the levels of thinking in the Analogy of the Line. Perception perceives mere appearances, the momentary changing impressions we have of the world. Belief is greater that perception because it relates not just to how things appear but to things as the ideas we have about what they are. However, these ideas are disconnected from the light of truth that makes things be what they really are. The fuller, more complete ideas of things, which have some sense of the truth of what they are, but only in a pragmatic and limited way (how they work) corresponds to the understanding or sciences of things. And Science or Wisdom is full knowing of the higher truths in the light of which all lower ideas, things, and appearances are what they are and can be known. In class I use the example of the chair. I place my chair in the front of the room and ask students what they see. “A chair,” everyone says. But, I say, do they see the chair from every angle? Do they see its past and present? Do they see the complete history of the chair? No, they only see a momentary glimpse of the chair from a certain angle, in a certain light, at a certain time. Is their glimpse of the chair the same as the chair? No, it is only the superficial momentary impression the chair makes on them. But they took their glimpse of the chair for the chair itself. The chair is its own thing, much more than their perception of it. When they answered that what they saw was the chair, they were already thinking on the level of belief. They believe in a chair that is more than their perception but is the cause of their perception, the chair ‘behind’ the appearance of the chair. And that thing is a real chair. But, they tell me, it is a chair because they call it a chair. What a chair is is not in the chair, it is our minds. But, I ask, if they use it as a ladder, is it still a chair? If they didn’t know what a chair was, would it still be a chair? Of course it would. And how much do they know about chairs anyway? Do they know about chairs the way a chairmaker does? The way an engineer does? No, the chairmaker and the engineer understand the geometry and physics of the chair in a way most of us don’t. It is this that allows them to design and build chairs, something we wouldn’t be nearly as good at. They understand the science of chairs. Is that all there is to know about chairs? A chairmaker understands how to make a chair, an applied engineer knows what makes a chair sturdy, but do they understand what chairs are for, the reasons for chairs to exist? Sure, we all do. Chairs are for sitting? But would chairs be the same if our knees bent the other way? Of course not. But would those other things still be chairs? Sure they would. They would allow us to sit. And why sit? To relax, be comfortable, and take away the strain of standing and walking on our bodies. To let us rest so that we can do things again. And why relax? So that our minds are free from being occupied by the discomfort of our bodies. And why is that important? To allow our minds to think about other, more important things. And why should our minds think about other things? Because these other things have value. And where do they get this value? From the higher Ideas! If it weren’t for the higher ideas, there would be nothing important to think about and do. And if there were nothing to think about or do, there would be no need to rest and relax. And if there were no need to rest and relax there would be no need for chairs. And if there were no need for chairs this chair wouldn’t exist. And if this chair didn’t exist you would not have the perception of the chair! We tend to get caught up by the superficial. We see a pretty chair and we think, I must have that chair. But chairs exist for other purposes than being pretty. And then we get a chair and we attach ourselves to our particular chairs. Like a little kid we say, “mine, this is my chair.” But what does it matter if you have this or that chair? If it is a chair, it does the job. And does it have to be a chair? Couldn’t it be a sofa, a stool, or even a bed? What’s important is that you can rest and relax in it. And what’s important about resting and relaxing is that you are then able to do and think about more important things. To know a chair is to know that, its truth! Higher Ideas | Science (Wisdom) Intellect Idea of Chair | Understanding (Sciences) Chair | Belief Opinion Glimpse | Perception We have seen how Plato’s levels of thinking correspond to the different objects of thinking, which correspond to the different stages of the climb from the cave in the Analogy. Knowledge is knowledge not of appearances and particular things, but of the higher truths they attempt to more or less successfully embody and enable. It may sound strange with something like a chair, but consider something more important, like the action of a policeman. How do we know that what the policeman does is right? How do we know if the policeman is an agent of justice? On the level of appearance, the policeman’s action is just because he’s a policeman. But are policemen the wise, who understand the true nature of justice? No, which is why, not nearly frequently enough, a policeman can be brought before a judge and the rightness of his action can be assessed. Here the assumption is that the judge has a better idea of what is right than the policeman, though what the judge writes (for example in the Supreme Court) is his opinion, on the level of belief. He too is supposed to make his judgment by reference to something higher, namely, the law. The law then, is supposed to be a purer, more just representation of what makes something right or wrong, a crime or not. But even the law is imperfect and erroneous. It is meant to embody justice, which means that the law itself can be measured against the yet higher standard of justice itself. If we don’t know what justice is, then how can we have just laws, thereby just court judgments, and thus just police actions?! You want a phone case that looks cool. But the case is only the most superficial covering of the phone, the phone is what it is really about. New phones are released all the time, and you want the newest coolest one (which soon becomes boring and taken for granted). But that’s because you thought it was what phone you had that mattered, whereas all phones are only means of communication and information. The phone doesn’t matter; what matters is that you are able to access information and communicate with others. But communication and information wouldn’t matter if those with whom you communicated and that about which you communicated and gained information didn’t matter. What really matters is the other people and the ideas that the communication and information is about. Thus, without these there would be no need for a means of communication. And without a need for communication there would be no phones. And without phones there would be no phone cases. Cool new phones and pretty phone cases owe their existences to the higher ideas and people, which are the reasons for communication and information. Where I live there are a lot of really expensive fancy cars, and I see a lot of tourists taking photos of themselves in front of them. But this photo of you with a car is nothing if the car is not yours. But even the fancy car, for all its fanciness, is still only a means of transportation. Transportation is the reason for the car. And we need means of transportation so that we can go places and do things that matter. The places we need to go and the things we need to do are necessary insofar as they are enactments of the higher ideas. Thus without the higher ideas there would be nowhere to go and nothing to do. Without anywhere to go or anything to do there would be no need for means of transportation. Without a need for transportation there would be no cars. And without cars there would be no fancy cars for you to admire and take photos of yourselves with. Fancy cars owe their existence to the higher ideas, and if you understand what cars are for, you’ll understand how silly and superficial is the fascination with fancy cars. The Ideas give reasons for the existence of everything lower and are thus the cause of all things that appear in the world of appearance. I have another way of trying to show my students that the ideas are there, but that they are so fascinated with appearances that they look right through them. I ask my students to draw a house, a dog, and my face (I am bald with a beard). We then discuss their drawings. Most of their houses are variations on the same general house. Very few houses look like what they draw, they draw the general idea of a house. I ask them the breed, size, and color of their dogs. Very few can answer because what they draw is the general idea of a dog. I point out how much variety there is in all the different dog breeds and how few look anything like their drawings. Finally, they almost all draw my face from straight on, despite the fact that I didn’t face any of them when they were drawing. Further, they don’t draw me, they draw general face (eyes, nose, ears, mouth) on generic bald head with generic beard. It’s more like Mr. Potatohead than me. They just combine their most general ideas. (A skilled artist, by the way, is able to put the ideas on hold and draw the light and shadow and color and shade rather than the ideas.) I point out that these same ideas, which have been awakened when they draw, are also at work when they see. They do not see me any more than they draw me. They see the world through the ideas of house, dog, face, etc. even though they are not aware that they are seeing ideas when they do so. The True World: The Realm of Ideas As we have seen, Plato explains that the true world, what is really real, is the Realm of Ideas. It is opposed to the apparent world, the world that seems to be real. This higher reality is intelligible, not sensible; eternal, not temporal; universal, not particular; a place of being, not of becoming. It is often misunderstood where and when this true world can be found. Plato’s frequent metaphorical illustrations of the nature of the true world and our access to it often give the impression that it is in another place and that we can enter it before or after life. But the true world is no transcendental and supernatural heaven where Ideas sit on clouds and our souls float around observing them with our spiritual eyes. The true world is not in another space and time, it is at once in no place or time and it is right here and now. That seems contradictory and misleading. If it is here and now then we are already in it and all Plato’s attempts to drag us out of the cave seem unnecessary. If it is in no place and at no time, then isn’t it just nothing, not real, a false world? Space and time are aspects of the world of becoming, not the world of being. Where is the perfect circle, the idea of the circle, the thing by which we assess the circularity of all particular circular things? It is clearly nowhere, not because limited humans fail to make perfect enough circles, but because all particular circles are made of something and have a certain size. But the perfect circle isn’t made of anything and has no particular size. Thus the perfect circle does not appear in the world of appearance but is known by the mind through geometry. It is nowhere and never. This nowhere where the Ideas are is ‘eternity’. The ideas are eternal. And yet it is right here and right now, giving circularity to any circular thing. The only way to recognize a circular thing as circular is by seeing it through the idea of the perfect circle that you have. You look right past the idea in order to look at the particular circular object. The idea of a circle is there whenever anything circular is there, and your mind ‘sees’ it, but your eye is so caught up with the particular circular thing that it ‘overlooks’ the very idea of the circle by which the circular thing gets its circularity. The realm of ideas is here and now, you just have to learn to live in it, instead of in the world of appearance, to recognize the various ideas combining to produce this and that object, rather than taking those objects to be all there is. Of course, we run the risk of trivializing the realm of ideas by populating it with chairs and circles. The Realm of Ideas is, according to the allegory of the cave, like the sun and stars, a higher and greater reality that gives light, meaning, and being to the lower ideas as well as to particular things and their appearances. The higher ideas are things like beauty, truth, justice, courage, virtue, knowledge, friendship, piety, etc. (These are some of the themes of Plato’s works.) And these higher ideas are the great goods of being, deriving their goodness from the Idea of the Good itself, beyond being. They get being, meaning, and value from the good, and all lower ideas, particular things, and even appearance, derive whatever being, meaning, and value they have from these higher ideas. This combination of being, meaning, and value may sound strange to our ears, trained as we are to separate them. But our sense that existence is in the world while meaning and value are ‘just in our heads’ would be precisely the sign of our cave-dwelling ignorance. We have seen the way man-made things, chairs and phones and cars for example, can trace their individual existences back to the ideas of the things they are, and still further to the higher meanings and values that these things serve. The difficult thing for us to comprehend is that plants and rocks and mountains and streams and all such ‘natural’ things ultimately serve these higher values too. That we can recognize a tree as a tree because we have the idea of a tree makes sense. That a tree exists because of this idea is more difficult. Except that we do have a contemporary equivalent of the Idea of a Tree, its genetic code. The genetic code of a tree is what makes it be a tree, and the common elements of this code are what make all trees of the same species. Further, theoretically, we would have to imagine that the genetic elements common to all trees are what make them trees and that those common to all plants make them plants. Finally, we would have to imagine that the genetic elements common to all living things are what make them live. This is only an analogy; I do not mean to suggest that Plato is talking about modern genetics with a different language. If anything, our conception of modern genetics is influenced by Plato’s theory of Ideas. But Plato goes what seems a step further. Why are there trees? Because they serve higher purposes? In Catholicism this will become the claim that God created trees to serve us, but this is a step Plato is not able to take. However, we can probably get a glimpse of what Plato has in mind if we think ecologically. Trees benefit—that is make things better for—other beings in the environment. And the environment itself is better for all the things in it. This environment, call it nature, exists then as an attempt at an embodiment of the Good itself. Nature itself is the sensible, transient copy of goodness itself. It is the manifestation of the Good on the level of appearance! But the natural world is a mere particular, temporary, transient appearance of the good, an apparent world; it is not the universal, eternal, transcendental true world and the Good that gives it its being. The Ideas that give meaning and value (truth and goodness) are thus the reasons for and causes of sensible existence. Apparent World: Particular Things The Realm of Ideas does not exist to serve the particular world with meaning and value. Rather, the particular world is merely the manifestation or enactment of the Ideas in time and space. It is our confusion and error that takes the particular things of the world to be real and independently existing things, rather than so many incomplete glimpses or copies of the Ideas. The world appears to us to be made of particular, sensible things. The true world, however, is the Ideas that transcend them. Look around wherever you are. The things around you seem real, true, solid, etc. They seem to exist. But this is because the lowest part of you exists on the same level as them, and this part of you takes over. It is, among other things, the part of you that has eyeballs and thus the part of you that things appear to. Thus, this is only the apparent world. It takes here and now, every second and every thing appearing to you, to be really important. But the seconds and the things that appear in them come and go, they barely exist at all. Even you yourself, the you that belongs with these particular things, is fleeting. In less that a century you won’t exist, and everything about you will change constantly in that time. Reading philosophy 25 centuries old, do you see how small and insignificant your life, possessions, experiences, etc. are? And yet there is another part of you. A part of you that reaches beyond your less than a century into eternity. That connects with Ideas that transcend everything particular you will ever come into contact with. These timeless Ideas are the very standards by which you measure meaning, being, and value in the things around you. They are eternal. Judged against the standard of this eternity, the world of particular things in which you normally dwell, as if in a cave, is nothing but shadows appearing and disappearing on a wall. Knowledge: Recollection The truth being the universal, eternal, transcendental ideas that are at once nowhere and never and here and now, the question becomes: how do we know them? Students frequently answer that we were taught them, but what is happening when we are taught and learn? Imagine a water bottle sitting on a chair (this is an example from my classes). You don’t know English. I point to the bottle and say, “bottle.” But what have I indicated? Does “bottle” refer to the bottle, the chair, the water, the color, the material, etc.? Does it mean ‘here’? Does it mean ‘I’m pointing’? How can you recognize it if you don’t already have the idea? You might be tempted to answer that if I point to a number of different bottles, and say “bottle” every time, then I can easily make sure it is clearly the bottles that are called “bottle”. But how could I have recognized the similarity between the different bottles that is being indicated if I didn’t already understand the concept of bottle and thereby recognize the various different objects as bottles. I have to know what bottles are to learn that the word “bottle” indicates bottles. This is why Plato claims that when we are learning, we are actually remembering something we already know. Knowledge is Recollection. Plato illustrates his theory of knowledge in a dialogue called Meno. He shows that people already know math and geometry without knowing they know and without having been taught. In the Meno Socrates poses questions to an uneducated slave who, by answering them, is able to figure out some pretty tricky geometrical stuff. In particular, he is able to make a square exactly twice as large as one Socrates has drawn in the dirt. He can do this, Socrates explains, because somehow he already knows geometry but has “forgotten” it. Think about those moments when someone is explaining something to you and suddenly it makes sense. “Ah ha, of course,” you say. Doesn’t it feel more like remembering, like you already knew it and the explanation just reminded you? Plato gives a metaphorical explanation of his theory of knowledge as recollection: He says that our souls, before birth, must have existed in the Realm of Ideas and had direct access to the Ideas themselves. We already knew all the truths before we were born, it is only that the trauma of being shoved into a body and thrown into sensible existence overwhelms us and causes us to forget. Thus to learn, to gain knowledge, is a process of remembering what we already know but have forgotten, distracted as we are by all the shiny and scary things in this life. It isn’t always clear, but this story should probably be taken as a metaphor. Remember, the eternity of the true world is not that it lasts for all time but that it is outside time. So neither the ideas nor our souls needed to have existed ‘before our births’ in that sense. Rather, The eternal part of yourself, your mind or soul, is that part of you that exists ‘outside’ time and space and thus has access to the realm of Ideas. When you are ‘recollecting’ or ‘remembering’ truths then, it is not that you’re recalling a past before you had a body. Instead you are ‘accessing’ that part of you that ‘transcends’ time, space, and your body, that part of you that knows eternal truths and is thus itself eternal. Plato’s idea of knowledge as recollection should not be understood as recollecting a disembodied past but as accessing a transcendental eternity. And this eternity is not in the past; it both never was nor will be, and is now. What is important here is that we understand that for Plato learning, gaining knowledge, is really awakening a knowledge that is already in you. Your true self already knows the truths, and you just need to recollect or remember them. Notice the words re-collect and re-member. Your knowledge of the ideas, for example the idea of a chair, has been dismembered and dispersed amongst the many particular chairs you have encountered. You just need to recollect or remember the idea, to put it back together, to know what a chair is, what makes a chair a chair. Beginning: Desire But how do we begin? How do we awaken the true self that already knows the truth and begin to remember and recollect our dispersed ideas? What can upset our stagnant complaisance, unchain us from our place in the cave and get us turned around? Plato gives a special place to desire in the initial process of knowing. This should not surprise you, considering all we leaned about the ancient Greek idea of philosophy as the love or desire of wisdom and the seeking and questioning that this desire inspires. And, though the desire that serves as the beginning of learning is not exclusively sexual, sexual or romantic desire is especially suited to set you on the path towards knowledge. Knowledge begins with desire. Desire is a matter of wanting something you don’t have, wanting things to be different than they are now. This difference between how things are and how you want them to be is experienced as dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction with how things are upsets your static and complaisant state of being immersed in the shadows of appearance. It opens you up. When you want something, be it an object, a feeling, or a person, the desire has an awakening effect. You take stock of things for the first time—at least, insofar as they differ from how you want them to be. And you are set on a quest to change things, to make things be as you want them to be. In the Phaedrus and Symposium, Plato focuses on desire of another person. You find someone beautiful. You want their beauty. You therefore do something about it, you try to seduce them or in some other way get them for yourself. You try to have sex with them. Let us imagine you succeed. Are your desires satisfied, are you done desiring? No, it may be that you find that what you wanted from them could not be satisfied from a single sexual encounter. You want more, whether it be more sex or more of them. You don’t just want their body, you want to know them, the real them. It could also be that you find that they didn’t satisfy you. You want someone else. In either case the desire, once awakened, is not satisfied by the thing you thought would satisfy it: a sexual encounter. Your desire has been awakened; you have been awakened. So perhaps you realize that this is not the only beautiful person and you go in search of the most beautiful. Or maybe you realize that the beauty you wanted from that person is not just skin deep but includes who they are. In either case, what you find is that there is more beauty, so you try to get that. But sooner or later you find that besides beauty people have all these other characteristics, or that everyone that is beautiful is kind of ugly too. It is not this or that beautiful person that you want, nor as many of them as you can get—no matter how deep that beauty runs—but the beauty itself; that is the thing that has attracted your desire to this and that person. It is not them, but the beauty in them, that your desire desires. Beauty is a funny thing. We call such disparate things beautiful: people, mountains, songs, artworks, sunsets. It can be applied to so many different things that we have come to believe that it is subjective, relative, “in the eye of the beholder.” But what is it that makes all these different kinds of things beautiful? ‘Beautiful means pleasing to the eye,’ you say. But can you see a song? ‘Beauty means pleasing to the senses,’ you say. But what is it that pleases the senses, that makes some people, landscapes, or songs beautiful and others ugly? Why do some things please your senses and not others? Perhaps you leap all the way to the end and say that it is a matter of the proportions of a thing that make it beautiful. But what are the beautiful proportions? And are the beautiful proportions the same in a person, a mountain, a song, or a car? Beauty, whatever it is, is what makes all beautiful things, however different they are, beautiful. In your attempt to satisfy your desire, says Plato, you may come to realize that no person, place, or thing is ever going to satisfy your desire because what has awakened it is not this or that person or thing but the beauty itself that was in that thing. And you can neither buy nor seduce beauty itself, the idea of beauty is gained through other means. I teach at a predominantly Hispanic college and it is always interesting to contrast the meaning of “Platonic love” in Spanish vs. English. In English, Platonic love means non-sexual love, a ‘just friends’ relationship. In Spanish, on the other hand, it means an unachievable love, a desire for someone that you can never have and thus can never be satisfied. Both are partially right and therefore completely wrong as explanations of what Plato had in mind. For Plato, when you discover that the body of the other person, even the mind of another person, cannot satisfy the desire for beauty that first attracted you to that other person, it becomes possible to go in pursuit of true beauty with that other person. In philosophical conversation. Your energy and attention, your desire, can thus be redirected away from the other person and joined with the other person in pursuit of the true object of desire: the idea of beauty itself. It is not that you don’t want to have sex with the other person, you just redirect that desire towards higher things. And it’s not that you can’t get the other person, it’s that getting them will not satisfy your desire because the true object of your desire is not the person but beauty itself. That is the proper Platonic meaning of the phrase “Platonic love.” Thus, desire, as desire for beauty, is what can awaken you from complacency and set you in pursuit of one after another dissatisfying object until eventually you discover that beauty itself was the object of your desire. And beauty, as one of the lower higher ideas, leads you into even higher ideas of truth and the good, from which even beauty derives its meaning, being, and value. Way: Dialectical Dialogue Desire, by awakening the soul out of its complacency and setting it in motion, begins the quest for wisdom. But, initially, wisdom is not the object of desire, beauty is. By attracting the senses to something more, beauty draws the higher, true self out of the oblivion of our forgetfulness. It thus has the power to set us on the way to knowledge. But what is the right way? We saw that this desire finds its true form in what we can call “Platonic love”, neither asexual friendship nor unattainable craving, but redirection of sensual desire towards a higher beauty: the Idea of Beauty itself. This love happens when lovers, rather than consummating their desire, either in sex or in its emotional parallel (where the other person remains the object), turns into a mutual pursuit of true beauty in conversation. And this pursuit gives way to the pursuit of yet higher Ideas like truth, justice, and the good. In other words, the true relationship is not love/desire of each other but a shared love/desire for wisdom. And love of wisdom is philosophy. Thus the true relationship is consummated in philosophical conversation. And this conversation is the way to knowledge. Plato wrote dialogues. Socrates (most of the time) and one or more interlocutors work together to find answers to important questions. The dialogue form is not just a literary device, it is privileged in the pursuit of truth. How good are you at seeing the weaknesses of your own beliefs? When you sit and think about things alone, how much do you really question your own ideas and how many different ones do you come up with by yourself? When we try to pursue wisdom alone, we tend to get stuck in our own ways of thinking. If we could see the problems with our beliefs, they wouldn’t be our beliefs. But when we enter into dialogue with another, we see the problems with their ideas better, as they see the problems with ours. The disagreements between us become productive. In Plato’s dialogues this has come to be called the Socratic Method. Socrates enters into conversation with someone in pursuit of the truth concerning some idea such as Beauty. The interlocutor proposes a definition of the idea (beauty is what is pleasing to the eyes) and Socrates shows a problem with the idea (but isn’t there beautiful music?). This continues, with the interlocutor revising his definition (beauty is what pleases the senses) and Socrates finding new problems (but what is it in all beautiful objects, despite their drastic differences, that causes this sensual pleasure?) until the interlocutor admits that he doesn’t know what beauty is. The conversation then shifts to a positive pursuit of the idea, with Socrates proposing rather than criticizing the definitions. This is Socrates’ method of awakening one to his ignorance and then seeking the truth in dialogue. Dialogue is thus the way to truth, but not just any dialogue. Plenty of conversations are not about higher ideas, and plenty lack the direction to pursue truth. What makes Socratic dialogue the philosophical method of acquiring knowledge is that it is dialectical. Dialectic, in Plato’s form, is specifically the question and answer form that moves ‘up’ towards higher, more universal, truer understandings of the higher ideas. It is the kind of dialogue that metaphorically moves out of the cave. By repeatedly scrutinizing each new answer in the direction of a higher comprehension of ideas, dialectical dialogue provides a path toward knowledge. End: Return to the Cave As we have seen, we achieve knowledge when we comprehend the higher Ideas, up to the Good itself. In the Allegory of the Cave this was metaphorically depicted as seeing the Sun. In the Analogy of the Line seeing the sun corresponds to the highest level of thinking, what Plato calls Science or Wisdom. Thus, as the climb out of the cave leads into the light of the Sun, the way to knowledge, dialectic, leads one into the light of Truth and the Good. But that is not the end of the story. In the allegory, Plato talks about returning to the cave. He admits that one will seem incompetent, even ridiculous, trying to navigate such a dark and phantasmatic world with eyes so accustomed to the light, but he claims that it is the necessary next step. The point of climbing out of the cave is not to rest contentedly in the sun, relaxing by the lake and admiring the beautiful things. Rather, there is something more that one must do once one has seen the truth. Knowledge is not the end; the end of knowledge is making the world better. Now that we have seen the true world, we understand that from the Good to the most superficial appearances, everything derives from the top down. The lower ideas are copies of the higher ones, things are copies of lower ideas, and appearances are copies of things. The problem is that they are copies produced by people who do not understand what they are copying, or even that they are copying. So how good can these copies be? In other words, these copies of copies of copies of beauty and truth and goodness are not very beautiful or true or good. Of course, they can never not be copies, a copy of a copy of a copy of the Good can never be the Good itself, but it can be a better copy. And a better copy, being more like the Good, is better. By seeing the Good, we can judge the things in the world of appearance and see how to make them better. The Way to knowledge leads to the Truth, to the Realm of Ideas, to the True World. When we enter that true world, we understand goodness itself. Understanding goodness, having overcome our attachment to this or that particular sensible good thing, we see the desirability of expanding the Good by making all things better. We also see true justice, and we see the value of doing what is just. These two Ideas especially, but all the higher ideas since they are better than the world of appearances, should motivate us to use our newfound knowledge to return to the cave and bring the Ideas more fully into particular things. Add to this that we discover that the truth of ourselves is the part of us that is like the Ideas and can traffic in them, and it becomes our duty to use this knowledge of the Truth to teach and rule others. Ruling others may sound like a suspicious consequence of learning the Truth. In fact, Plato says, at present we end up with the worst possible rulers. Our current rulers want to rule, they want power, and fame, and wealth. They rule for the sake of their self-centered desires. One who has seen the truth, however, won’t want to rule because what you rule over is the world of appearances and the people insofar as they are caught up in appearances. Those who have discovered the ideas know how little these appearances are worth—certainly not worth all the fighting over them that happens in politics. And yet, those who have seen the truth will also have seen that what the good does is emanate goodness, Politicians that have not seen the Good block and hoard the goodness from reaching every aspect of apparent life. But those who have seen will have understood that it is their duty to assist and extend the Good’s distribution and thus will feel motivated, not by selfish desire but by higher understanding, to teach and rule others in order to spread the Good. Thus all things may become better. The Self: The Tripartite Soul Plato offers a metaphor of the human self as a chariot, horses, and driver. The chariot, he says, is the body, which does not move itself but must be moved by something else. What moves the body is the soul. What moves the chariot is the horses and driver, thus they are the analogues of the soul. In Plato’s image there are two horses. One is motivated by hunger, thirst, fear, lust, etc., in other words by passions and desires related to objects and oneself. The other horse is motivated by need for acceptance, respect, approval, peer pressure, etc., that is, by other people or feelings and their judgments. These two kinds of desires, the appetites and the need for approval, draw the self this way and that in pursuit of satisfaction. If the appetitive horse takes over, the approval horse follows (because it is by nature a follower) seeking the approval of the appetites themselves. Then your self and your soul can be pulled here and there by desires and fears. If, on the other hand, the approval horse takes over, it has no direction of its own and so will seek the approval of whoever is offering it. Thus you follow a leader or a crowd, a role model or a bad influence. This might not be the worst thing in the world if the person or people you follow are good and true and their examples lead you in a good direction, but it is just as likely that you will fall in with ‘a bad crowd’ and follow the wrong people in the wrong direction. Ideally, neither the appetitive nor the approval horse takes over. Rather, they are reined in by the charioteer, the thinking being of the three. The one who has a plan and knows where to go. Ideally, the driver leads the chariot because the driver is your reason, not the emotional but the rational part of your soul or self. If the rational one takes over, and if it guides yourself in the direction of and in the light of the truth, then your whole person will do the right things. Your approval horse will follow neither the dictates of your appetites nor the dictates of others but the commands of your reason. Thus, two against one, your appetites will be kept under control and on the right path. True Self: Rational Mind This tripartite soul is Plato’s image of the human self. The body, of course, is a temporary, changing, sensory appearance of the self, belonging to the realm of shadows. The soul, on the other hand, is the self ‘outside’ the cave, not free from the body in the after-death sense but free from the body in the sense that the body is but the appearance or manifestation of these ‘ideas’. You are your mind and your two kinds of desires. But, though the self be the charioteer and the horses, the highest truth of the self is the driver, just as the highest Idea is the Idea of the Good. The human being’s true self is its rational mind. It is this self which is capable of gaining knowledge, of reaching the truth. But notice that desire is what set us on the path to truth, and does so again and again. This desire is the desire of the appetitive horse. Without it the chariot would never have gotten moving in the first place. And even after we discovered the disappointment in obtaining the sexual object, the transformed desire sought the deeper person behind their body and the beauty that would be honored by others. The approval horse continued us along the path toward knowledge that the appetitive horse initiated with its sensual desire. These horses are the necessary conditions of obtaining truth and, though the true self is the driver, the horses are never to be ‘defeated’. What would a chariot be without horses to move it? By way of anticipation, we can contrast Plato’s idea of overcoming desires in the sense of reining them in with Augustine’s (Christian) notion of overcoming desires by denying them and doing away with them. This will entail a different vision of knowledge and truth, a True World in which one is free, not for their desires (as our modern version has it), but free from their desires. Plato’s true self, as charioteer is not free from its horses but in control of them. Thus the true self, the eternal rational mind that knows the Ideas, must take control of the desires and guide your life in pursuit and projection of the Good.