Plato – Philosophy Scare

11. Dancing Around the Metaphysical Barn

Plato and Aristotle take opposed positions on the question of where the “principle” of a thing, that which makes it what it is, is located. For Plato, such a principle is a form separate from the thing, in which the thing “participates.” For Aristotle, the principle shapes and organizes the thing from within, as its essence.

So why, if they are so opposed, do Plato and Aristotle, when pushed, turn into one another?

For Plato, forms are things and so must have their principles outside them. Republic 509b tells us that the ultimate principle of all of them, which makes each form what it is, is the form of the good. And this form has no principle beyond itself: it is “sovereign” over the entire intelligible order. Plato finesses this conclusion by claiming that the form of the good has no determinate nature, and so needs no further determining principle, but the fact remains: to understand the form of the good we must look to it, not beyond it; to that extent, Plato has become an Aristotelian.

For Aristotle, the principle of a thing is to be found within the thing; but what about the set of all material things, the cosmos itself? It is not only a thing, but an ordered thing, with earth at the center and the sphere of the fixed stars at the edge. Where does this unifying order come from?

It cannot come from anything within the cosmos, for everything within the cosmos contains matter, which means it can change. Anything which can change at all will eventually change, incrementally, into something else—at which time the thing it originally was will cease to exist. The world for Aristotle had no beginning in time; so if the principle of the cosmos were within it, like an essence, the cosmic order would have ceased to exist by now (see Phaedo 72b-d for a related argument).

So in Metaphysics XI, Aristotle concludes that the ordering principle of the cosmos is outside the cosmos: the immaterial, purely rational, and so consummately ordered, prime mover. The cosmos, we learn, “loves” the prime mover, but is unable to unite with it; so it imitates it by ordering itself. Whence this “love” (ἔρως), and what is it? We are not told; as Platonic did with participation (#8), Aristotle owes us a theory and gives us a word.

All of which was laid bare by Kant, most spectacularly in his “Third Antinomy.” The thesis of that antinomy states that everything has a cause; and since a cause for Kant at least partially precedes its effect in time, nothing can cause itself. The causes of a thing, the principles which make it what it is, are thus outside the thing, as with Plato.

The antithesis states, by contrast, that some things—free actions—are not caused by anything preceding them in time. To find the principle of a free act, you must look at the act itself, where you will find the atemporal moral law. So the antithesis is, broadly, Aristotelian .

Each of these two contradictory statements, Kant tells us, can be proven. What he doesn’t tell us is that his proofs are reductio’s: The proof of the thesis assumes the antithesis and demonstrates its falsity; the proof of the antithesis does the reverse.

So if you choose the (Platonic) thesis, you will eventually be forced into the (Aristotelian) antithesis, to avoid an infinite regress of causes according to which the form of the good would have a principle outside it, and that principle would also have a principle outside it, and so on…(This argument was known to Aristotle, who mysteriously called it the Third Man.)

If you choose the (Aristotelian) antithesis, you will be forced to adopt the (Platonic) thesis, on pain of locating the eternal order of the cosmos within the cosmos itself, where it cannot be because the cosmos contains matter. Matter brings change, and since anything which can change at all will eventually change into something else, the cosmic order would not be eternal.

These are not arguments (Kant’s “proofs” are notoriously bad) so much as ingrained tendencies. When we look at them that way, we see that Kant has sketched the structure of a metaphysical barn, around which Platonists and Aristotelians had been chasing each other for centuries—right up to the third antinomy itself, which abruptly stops the chase.

It does this by claiming that the thesis belongs, not to reality, but to one faculty of the mind (the understanding) while the antithesis belongs to another faculty, reason. Kant’s solution is not only abrupt, but more than a bit ad hoc (in spite of the hundreds of pages of argument intended to establish it). It also, as we will see, has other, and severe, problems—problems so severe as to impeach Kant’s entire “transcendental philosophy.”

But we also see, already, that if Kant had written nothing other than the “Third Antinomy,” he would have been the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Because it was he who uncovered, buried in the texts of the history of philosophy, an ancient and worrisome structure: the metaphysical barn.

8. Aristotle’s Fix

With Aristotle, philosophy is fixed: a problem with Plato is solved, with the result that certain tracks are laid, a certain intellectual prairie is fenced, and the mental grooves in which philosophy will move for millennia are dug out. Aristotle does this by hammering together two divergent rails of Plato’s system.

Plato posited unchanging Forms and changing sensibles. What holds these two realms together remains a mystery, yet together—somehow—they must be. How else will the forms have title to guide our actions, and how else can soul move between them, as it apparently must?

Plato is uninterested in such questions. His attention goes to the χορισμός, the spacing or separation between forms and sensibles, rather than to their necessary unity. So when it comes to the overall relation between forms and sensibles Plato owes us a theory but, as Aristotle points out (at Metaphysics I.9) gives us just a word — “participation,” μέθεξις.

Some might say (I did, in # 5) that this is a good thing—that it enables Plato to convey the human comedy in its tragic dimension. But Aristotle looks at it from the other side: the “separation” of Forms from the human world leaves them unchained from everything they are supposed to explain. Their whole domain becomes a limitless, philosophically unneeded complication of the sensory world. Individual forms cannot be defined, and morality becomes tragedy;

So Aristotle kills his teacher: he rejects, not the entirety of Plato’s theory of forms, but one of its core components, the separation of forms from the sensible, changing world. The eternals are to be found within the temporals. They are essences, not forms, and now Aristotle has to do what he thinks Plato should have done: not merely describe humans dealing with an unexplained separation, but actually explaining the relation between an essence and the thing whose essence it is. That explanation goes by way of matter, the other major component of a thing. Matter is so cryptic and unstable that we might just call it everything in a thing which is not its form.

Explaining the relation of form, now essence, to things, now matter, is the core of Aristotelian metaphysics. The treatment extends through the three central and tortured books of his Metaphysics: Zeta, Eta, and Theta. I have followed it elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression, Chapter One), and have argued that in the end, the relation between essence and matter is one of domination. Or, seen from matter’s point of view, of oppression.

Essence for Aristotle exercises a threefold domination over matter: it draws a boundary for the thing, excluding most of the cosmos from it while allowing some matter into it; the proper amount varies with the kind of thing it is (elephant essences need a lot more matter than squirrel ones). The essence also establishes and maintains the order of events within those boundaries, arranging or disposing the parts of the thing; and it has the initiative to govern the thing’s interactions with what is outside its boundaries—the rest of the world—when those interactions are as they should be. Thus, a person’s interactions with other people and things are as they should be when they are governed by the human essence, which is reason (λόγος) itself.

Boundary, disposition, and initiative—or exclusion, control, and isolation—are the watchwords here, the essential features of Being itself, or as I call it (following Aristotle) ousia. The three are found for Aristotle on the level of the human individual, whose essence is reason; in the household, where reason is found in the pater; in the state, where reason solves the conflicts that arise because human individuals have only very partial, and so perspectival, knowledge of the world; and on the level of the cosmos itself, where the ultimate essence, also known as the Prime Mover, orders the movement of the stars and so the passage of the seasons, and so human life.

Aristotle’s model of Being, as I have traced elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression), will become an obsession of philosophers. They will, down through the ages, explicate it, justify it, apply it, tinker with it, challenge it, and finally criticize it; but they will never leave it behind. This means that numerous engines of oppression in society—patriarchal households, capitalist factories, slave plantations, totalitarian states—will operate according to philosophical blueprints, established by Aristotle.

Who was only trying to kill his teacher.

6. Plato and the Slaves

“Wait up!”—The first words spoken in Plato’s Republic, which in its entirety is a report of words spoken, come from a slave child, asking Socrates to remain where he is so that Polemarchos can catch up with him and ask him to dinner.

But after this very prominent beginning, slaves disappear from the Republic. Plato doesn’t even mention them until Books VIII and IX, where they come up briefly four times in the discussion of other subjects. What happens to them? Are they perhaps present. but under another name?

I think Plato want us to look for them.

Some who have done so think that the lowest denizens of Plato’s tri-level state, οἱ πολλοί for whom Plato has such contempt, are his rethinking of ancient slavery, but that cannot be. The lowest, business-oriented layer of the Platonic state is presented, not as a kind of slavery, but as a laissez-faire society, in which people are free to live as they wish—on the one condition that they not seek or exercise political power. It’s an ancient version of a libertarian dream, a sort of Mediterranean Dallas where everyone lives trying to get rich (or richer, like Polemarchos’ father Cephalos) and to have fun (until, like Cephalus, they realize they have to die).

So let us look further. Who, in Plato’s city, lives like a slave?

How does a slave live?

We all know the basics. A slave’s entire life is in the service of their master. Slaves do not choose what to do with their lives; they spend them working at assigned tasks. They own no property and are allowed no legal marriages; even their children may be taken from them if the master decides.

And who lives this way in the Platonic city? Its rulers, the “guardians.” They spend their lives working for the state, their communal master (communal ownership of slaves was the rule in Sparta, which was the model for many aspects of Plato’s ideal state). They beget children, as arranged by the state, but are not allowed to raise them. They have no private property—aren’t their dwellings without front doors, so anyone can look in and see what they possess? Even their meals are taken in a common mess hall.

Plato, in sum, is making the argument that social stratification is justifiable—if the people at the top live like those at the bottom.

What if we tried that here? According to Nicholas Lemann in his The Big Test, we did. Sort of. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard from i933 to 1953, believed that Harvard’s job should no longer be educating the scions of fine old families, but the forming of a moral and intellectual elite, who would selflessly manage the country that, after World War II, would manage the world.

Conant’s idea was that just as the leaders in Plato’s city examined young people throughout their early education to see who was worthy to become a guardian, so American educators should test the young to see who was worthy of American society’s most important jobs.

In accordance with what I call Cold War philosophy, “worthiness,” aka “intelligence,” was defined as the ability to make choices quickly and correctly, so the scrutiny came importantly in the form of multiple choice tests. Thus originated the SAT’s, whose influence on American life is hard to overstate. (If you know that someone scored over 700’s on their SAT’s, you can be pretty sure they are living a comfortable and pleasant life; if you know that someone got a 400 or so, you know they are much less privileged.)

But Conant had not read Plato well or thoroughly enough, for there was one big difference between his plan and Plato’s: Conant did not realize that he was asking the young people whom he educated to live like slaves, sacrificing any chance at wealth and family life for the austere pleasure of benefiting their country.

Plato, by contrast, understood quite well that turning young people into guardians requires that they be molded, lied to, and finally forced into it. The education they receive has (like Spartan education) a strong component of indoctrination, inculcating the view that the only worthwhile life is one lived in the service of the state. Like all young people in the Platonic state, the future guardians are also told that human souls are either iron, brass, silver or gold—and they themselves have souls with a lot of gold. They are designed by nature itself, in other words, to be guardians, and so can be nothing else. Even then, they will accept guardianship only under compulsion—the strongest compulsion a truly noble soul can accept, which is that of a good argument: if you don’t become a ruler yourself, you will be ruled by your inferiors.

All this, to say the least, was incompatible with American ideas of freedom, which are more akin to the live-as-you-please mentality Plato assigns to οἱ πολλοί. Plato’s systematic indoctrination, lying, and intellectual compulsion were out of the question; and Harvard graduates, living as they pleased, flocked to the big money and golden life of Wall Street.[1]

It’s all a case of Plato gone wrong, and with a moral for us all: if you are going to take cues from the history of philosophy, you’d better get it right.

We’ll see more of this.

[1] In 2007, 58% of male Harvard graduates, and 43% of the women, took jobs on Wall Street; in 2014, 70% of Harvard seniors sent résumés to Wall Street and consulting firms: Amy J. Binder, “Why Are Harvard Grads Still Flocking to Wall Street? Washington Monthly September/October 2014, accessed August 5, 2020

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2014/why-are-harvard-grads-still-flocking-to-wall-street/

5. Plato as Putzfrau

Plato invented his forms, I suggested in #2, by cleaning up the gods; and “cleaning up” deserves slightly more discussion (actually, a lot more; but I’ll keep it short). First, they must be made self-consistent: instead of a mass of impulses and projects, a god must become a pure unity. It therefore cannot be as multifarious (or as interesting) as Zeus or Hera, but must be identified with a single basic property or character, from which it never departs: it becomes an unchanging “form” (εἴδος). Death, of course, would be a change; so the form, like a god, exists forever. Since a form never changes, what it causes is always the same: a form always affects human affairs in the same way. Not only is it eternal itself, but its eternal causal activity can sustain us forever.

We now have a much more positive vision of the afterlife than Homer’s, but one bought at a price: the need for immortality has led us to postulate another realm, one where things are perfectly what they are and so never change. (There are, to be sure, other motives for, and problems with, the theory of forms; see H. F. Cherniss’ famous “The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas” for a starter on this.)

But even cleaned-up gods must be kept away from our minds; if we are merely the forms’ playthings, as we were the gods’, the whole idea of ethics is undone. This runs Plato against a problem, for he never sorted out the nature of the human mind. Soul not only exists, for example, on both the level of the forms and that of experienced things, but somehow rises and falls between them—a “fact” which for Plato remains inexplicable, an “ordinance of necessity” (Phaedrus 248c).

In particular, as I have argued elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression, Appendix 1), Plato never assigns stable boundaries to the mind: things perceived at a distance, such as a beautiful body, can enter into the soul (in the Palinode of the Phaedrus, as a flow of particles) and affect its inner core. If bodies can do this, can’t forms do so as well?

The problem can be solved by locating the forms, not merely outside our minds, but outside our world altogether. Easy enough to do, once you have placed them outside of time. Time thus becomes the defining property of the human and natural worlds, and its absence helps define the world of the forms.

A form resembles itself in all aspects: it is self-identical. So the predicational philosophy practiced by Thales (at least as Aristotle reads him) is restricted to the higher, formal level of Plato’s bifurcated cosmos. The variability and passions of the gods now inhabit the human world, where variability and passion have always existed, and where they now exist exclusively. And so we find ourselves in the wonderful, variegated world of the Platonic dialogues, from which no human emotion is excluded.

The characters there are memorable. You have the hilariously stupid Hippias, who thinks the form of beauty—the one thing, supremely beautiful itself, that makes all other beautiful things beautiful—might be gold. There is Thrasymachos, whose energetic cynicism and vigorous argumentation are, in the end, terrifying. There is sincere Phaedrus, whose enthusiasm for learning is as touching as his judgment about whom to learn from is risible. There is gorgeous Charmides, who—right in the middle of his eponymous dialogue—sets off a homosexual group grope.

Reading Plato in Greek is actually scary, because eventually you must admit that you are putty in his hands. If he wants you to fall in love with someone (Socrates), you will fall; if to hate someone (Anytus, Meletus), you will hate them; if to pity someone (Cephalus), you will pity them. If Plato wants you to laugh, you obediently laugh; if to cry, you cry. If he wants you to pick the book up and dance around the room with it, you will do that too.

But for all his genius, there is a flaw in our author. Socrates never defined a single form, because he didn’t think we could have such knowledge until we died; such was the main promise of the Socratic afterlife. And Plato, in his later writings, doesn’t really revoke this: when he turns from presenting Socratic aporiai, concluding bafflements, to his own “positive” ideas, the emphasis turns as well, from attempting to define single forms to more general discussions of their common status. No individual form is ever, then, defined by Plato. It can’t be; for while the forms themselves are pure and unchanging, we, our language, and the things around us are not. The best we can do, according to the Timaeus, is use a “bastard discourse” (λογισμός νὀθος, Timaeus 52b; cf. 29b-d) to treat these “likenesses” (εἰκόνα, 29c).

So there are two kinds of philosophy in Plato: philosophy among the forms, which deals in realities and attains truth—and which we are incapable of; and philosophy as we practice it, which deals in things similar to the forms and achieves likelihoods.

One seeming exception: the definition of justice in the Republic,which is as clear as can be: justice consists in each part of the soul or state doing its proper job. Plato never actually says, in the Republic, that he is discussing the form of the state and so of justice; but it’s hard to say what else it could be.

But there is something off about this definition: etwas stimmt nicht, as the Germans would say. Plato keys his treatment to two kinds of justice, justice in the state and in the individual. But rather than present these two cases separately, as Homer might, and then wrestle their commonality out of the presentations, Socrates stipulates that justice is the same in both cases. His warrant for this is that we say (φάμεν) that justice exists both in the individual and in the state; that we (Greeks) might speak ambiguously here is summarily excluded. That certain features apply to both forms of justice is therefore not wrested from the facts, but presupposed. The presupposition becomes a premise for the investigation, and argument suddenly replaces simile.

So the “bastard” discourse is abandoned—by simple decree. From first to last, Plato’s bastardly presentations of human inquiry—with all their humor, sorrow, fear, and desire—are tragic depictions of a group of people who cannot have what they most need—knowledge of the meanings of moral terms.