A Word About Plato

(Note: most of the time I going to assume that the outlook of Socrates is really that of Plato, although I’m aware the truth might be a bit more complicated.)

 

Plato is interesting as a philosopher partly because most of Western philosophy has been an effort to stretch out and transform his approach to reasoning.

 

The essence of Plato was his idea that we could understand not only the aspects of the universe as we saw them , but aspects that were beyond our observation, because they were necessarily such and such a way. So, for example, he presumed to “correct” Greek religion on the grounds that the gods were morally perfect, whereas accounts of them in literature feature very imperfect behavior.

 

(A reminder: we don’t really know what the historical Socrates thought, and most modern accounts rely on extremely unreliable narrators. Plato almost certainly didn’t know or care what Socrates “really” thought and used him the same way Sophocles used Oedipus.)

 

Plato reasoned that the universe was made of Forms like “beauty” or “excellence” that were projected onto our limited understanding, like shadows on a wall. The material objects that we encountered in life were actually inferior manifestations of what was, in reality, pure Form. People were themselves Forms, too—souls projected onto the senses as material objects.

 Right away this spawns several crucial concepts.

1. mind/body dualism: the mind is separate from the body and persists after death without it

2. reality versus perception: the universe that we perceive is related logically to the actual, real universe, but our perception is a shadow of reality. We see intermediate objects like trees and rocks, whereas these objects are actually manifestations of Forms like hardness and vitality.

3. power of reason: reason enables humans to tease out the nature of the “real” universe and its attributes, mostly by moral analogies. For example, the necessity of an attribute like “blueness” (the color of my computer keyboard) being unified, or having a separate existence from the laptop I’m using to type this, is determined by the unity of an act with its motivation (Republic, IV).

Plato/Socrates mainly dedicated his dialogues to specific problems in merging metaphysics with moral principles. In other words, Plato sees the Just as both a set of potential civic conditions, and also as a fundamental Form of things. So, for example, humans feel a constant turmoil over what it means to be moral; we agonize over the conflict between the Just versus the Fitting. These are perceived by us indirectly, as entities that reflect the Form, but are not the same thing as the Form.

Plato therefore mixes his discussions of what it means to be just (or fiting, or excellent, or wise) with analysis of the Forms of [the] Just, or other personified virtues.

I will finish up here by noting that Plato doesn’t really describe the Forms in much detail, his explanation of why he believes in Forms varies (he seems to cite a different reason each time the question comes up in The Republic), and he mentions that each of the Forms has an antithesis (e.g., the Just versus the Unjust). While each of these are major problems worthy of discussion, Platonism would continue to evolve.

 KANT AND PLATO

 Kant uses the two-millennia old method of Plato of reasoning from the existence of logical categories to infer the necessary attributes of the world. Quoting from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy, “The sensible world, or the world of appearances, is constructed by the human mind from a combination of sensory matter that we receive passively and a priori forms that are supplied by our cognitive faculties” (“Immanuel Kant,” §2.2). The a priori forms were intuitions of objects, which Kant supposed had a separate existence from the attributers we observed about them (the “concepts”).

 However, while Plato thought the form (analogous to Kant’s intuitions) was a universal attribute-entity, Kant believed his intuition was peculiar to each sort of object; and while Plato thought this life was an inferior expression, or “projection,” of true reality on our mortal senses, Kant thought concepts enriched intuitions by giving them discernable attributes.

 

THE DECLINE OF METAPHYSICS AND ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

 

After Kant, there were a large number of currents in Western philosophy; most of these tended to move away from metaphysics.

 

It’s not hard to see why: up until the revolutionary period, there was little concrete evidence for sweeping statements about the world. Naturally, this was a gradual development. The explosive growth of scientific information and improved instruments seemed to make metaphysics redundant. Metaphysics did continue to play a role in specialized questions about evidence and causality, but mostly everyone seemed to agree that useful questions about the world were being studied by specialized scientists.

 

Philosophy therefore lost interest in the use of platonic intuition to solve questions that preoccupied scientists.

 

This may help explain why attention turned to the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer.

 

Schopenhauer is an extremely important, interesting thinker who served as a pivot, or fulcrum. He rejected not Kant, but the mainstream interpretation of Kant/Plato as using unknowable objects to underlie all of reality. Schopenhauer adopted and enhanced existing notions of the world as Will, meaning, the evanescent, underlying reality of the world is a unifying drive, “an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty.” (“Arthur Schopenhauer,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philopsophy, §4).

 

Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Plato and Kant seems oddly mystical, but also oddly analogous to the effect of observation on superposed quantum states.

 

It is the human being that, in its very effort to know anything, objectifies an appearance for itself that involves the fragmentation of Will and its breakup into a comprehensible set of individuals. The result of this fragmentation, given the nature of Will, is terrible: it is a world of constant struggle, where each individual thing strives against every other individual thing. The result is a permanent “war of all against all” akin to what Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) characterized as the state of nature. (Ibid)

 

This certainly takes Plato in an unexpected direction. Schopenhauer’s outlook is extremely bleak, and also very strange: he believes that our conscious perception of the universe divides it into pieces, which are thrown into a mutual struggle to the death. It’s as though the collapse of the superposition of quantum states (i.e., the probability distribution of particles in a designated space) transformed the photons from undifferentiated waves to miserable, angry, mortal particles!

 

Schopenhauer’s position was that every person’s actions had external causes; this meant that free will was an illusion. Schopenhauer also argued that our ability to influence future events also did not exist. This was ultimately because the universe was a single unified Will, but without self-awareness or meaning. Like Plato, Schopenhauer believed the universe was a unified whole, and its division into entities was an illusion; as humans, we created individual entities through our attempt to make sense of the world, and this was absolutely awful.

 

What makes this interesting is that Schopenhauer was one of the more candid early philosophers; prior to him, thinkers were usually obligated to hide their atheism, as well as other heretical opinions, He absorbed non-Western thought far more than philosophers before him, and his ideas were quite popular among the physicists of the early 20^th century: Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Albert Einstein, and others. The collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics seems inspired by Schopenhauer’s metaphysics; so does quantum entanglement.