PLATO’S GREATEST HOAX
D. R. Khashaba
I
INTRODUCTION
After the execution of Socrates, Plato left Athens and spent several years
moving around. The duration of his voluntary exile is differently assessed
by different scholars; but that it was years rather than months is
undisputed. He must have been mulling what to do with his life. He had been
profoundly influenced by the character, life, thought, and ideals of
Socrates and he felt it his duty and his mission to preserve all that.
Plato knew that to the last Socrates maintained that he had no philosophy
to teach. When at his trial Socrates declared that it was his mission to
teach philosophy and virtue, he made it clear in the sequel that he did
that by questioning people, seeking to make them examine themselves and
correct their evaluations and their priorities. And even if Plato had not
yet definitely articulated the thought in the words of Phaedrus
275c-d, yet he was already convinced that philosophical insight is not
something to be conveyed in set words but is a fire kindled through the
converse of minds. (See Protagoras, 347c-348a, Phaedrus,
274b-278e, Epistle VII., 341b-345a.)
Plato was a born poet and it is said that he had attempted drama in his
early youth. He now started writing dramatic pieces to keep alive the
memory of Socrates and do homage to “the best, and wisest, and most
righteous man”. No more than Aeschylus or Sophocles would Plato use drama
to propagate positive doctrine. In his dramatic pieces the arguments
themselves are among the dramatis personae; they have their role
in the drama. The end of a Platonic dialogue is not a conclusion
established argumentatively but a total impression created artistically, a
vision.
Naturally every piece would aim at specific effects and not one piece of
Plato’s works serves solely a single purpose. The two Hippias
pieces make fun of the bombastic sophist. In the Hippias Minor
whose paradox puzzles erudite scholars the paradox is the crux of the
drama. It has a hidden proviso: intentionally (hekôn) doing what
is bad – if that were possible – would be better than doing what is bad
unintentionally (akôn). In the Crito, when Crito says
that the many can inflict the greatest harm, Socrates says, “Would that the
many could inflict the greatest harm, for they would then be capable of
doing the greatest good” (44d). For Socrates-Plato capability, knowledge,
virtue are inseparable. As Spinoza was to say, only one with adequate ideas
acts; with inadequate ideas one is simply driven hither and thither.
The dramatic genius of Plato needs no showing. In the opening part of the Crito you can touch the quivering vocal chords of the good old
man, choked with anxiety and grief. The Protagoras is a
masterpiece of character portraiture, not only of Protagoras but of all the
participating individuals. I wonder why no literary critic has made a full
study of Plato’s works as sheer drama.
The Apology and the Crito stand apart as perhaps the only
dialogues that are to be taken at face value, (which is not the same as
taking them for factual accounts: dramatic truth is deeper than fact). I
could take up the dialogues one by one to show that argument is the element
of least import in them. If, as I approach my ninetieth birthday, I could
reasonably count on having two more years or so, I would set on doing that
as my last work. But now I will be content with demonstrating my point by
going through the Phaedo.
The Phaedo is clearly a multi-purpose dialogue. In the first place
it was to immortalize the heroic martyrdom of Socrates. This provides the
narrative framework. Along the way it ranges over five fields. (1) The
Socratic conception of the intelligible realm. (2) Praise for the
philosophic life as the best life for a human being. (3) Integrally
connected with this, affirmation of the divinity of the soul. (4) In the
‘autobiographical’ passage (95e-102a), curiously neglected by all scholars,
we have the Socratic-Platonic definition of the nature and scope of
philosophical thinking. (5) Then we have the argument for immortality which
I designate as the great hoax. We will take up these five threads one by
one in this order. In what follows I have made use of Chapter Five, “The
Meaning of the Phaedo”, of my Plato: An Interpretation
(2005), I confess that this paper has been partly a cut-and-paste job.
II
THE INTELLIGIBLE REALM
Socrates was convinced that we are human only inasmuch as we live in a
world formed by the ideas and ideals that are born in the mind. This was
the basis of the Socratic distinction between the intelligible and the
perceptible realms and this insight was the first foundation of the
Socratic-Platonic vision.
The perceptible we find all around us in the world; the intelligible – to noêton – we do not 'find' anywhere, we bring it to birth in our
mind. It is with this inner world that Socrates was wholly concerned, for
Socrates saw that, for good or for ill, when we act as human beings, our
action is governed by ideas, ideals, values, and aims formed in and by the
mind.
This is the basis of Plato’s notion of Forms. The Forms are simply the
intelligible ideas. Things in themselves have no meaning and no reality for
us. Things themselves do not give us knowledge. All knowledge, all
understanding, comes from the mind. In things outside us there is no
permanence; they have no character. (For further elucidation of this, see
section V below.)
This is the gist of Plato’s grossly misunderstood and much maligned ‘Theory
of Forms, and reluctantly I permit myself to digress here to address for
the nth time this prevalent misunderstanding..
Tomes have been written debating Plato’s ‘Theory of Forms’. I adamantly
insist that Plato had no such theory. The notion of the intelligible ideas
is not a theory but a creative idea. Plato tentatively tried various
metaphors for relating the ‘forms’ to the perceptible objects:
participation, inherence, communion, repliction. Each of these metaphors,
if affirmed positively and definitively, would be a ‘theory’; and it is
these provisional theories that Plato makes Parmenides blast in the first
part of the Parmenides.
An aspect of the supposed ‘Theory of Forms’ is said to be the assertion of
the ‘separate existence’ of the Forms, a misunderstanding initiated by
Aristotle. The chôrismos affirmed by Socrates and Plato is the
separation of the intelligible and the perceptible. Plato sings the praise
of the ideal Forms in winged words and in the Phaedrus gives us
the myth of the celestial abode of the Forms. But Socrates in the elenctic
discourses finds all ‘forms’ merging together and in the end they are found
to be one with Sophia, nous, phronêsis. Plato regularly speaks of
the antitheses of the moral forms in the same vein as of the moral forms.
In the first part of the Parmenides Socrates’ hesitation to admit
forms of hair and dirt is blamed on his immature age. In the Sophist the ‘Friends of the Forms’ are taken to task for thinking
“that change, life, soul, understanding have no place in that which is
perfectly real — that it has neither life nor thought, but stands immutable
in solemn aloofness, devoid of intelligence" (248e-249a, tr. Cornford.) How
can all this be compatible with a ‘theory’ that gives Forms a ‘separate
existence’? Above all, would not the ‘separate existence’ of the
intelligible negate the distinction between the intelligible and the
perceptible?
III
THE PHILOSOPHICAL LIFE
Early in the dialogue Socrates says that a true philosopher makes of his
whole life an exercise in dying and being dead (64a). Not only is a
philosopher least concerned with things of the body but she or he also find
the body an impediment in the contemplation of the mind. Where does the
soul (mind) come into contact with reality? When it tries to examine
anything through the body it is led into error. It is in reasoning that it
approaches what is real. It reasons best when it gives up dependence on the
body and reaches out for true being. The philosopher's soul (mind)
therefore shuns the body and seeks to be in itself. Now, we say there is
such a thing as justice, and beauty, and goodness. But we never perceived
any such thing with our senses. It is when we examine these in thought that
we come closest to knowing them. (65b-66a)
But when the soul (mind) reflects all by itself and in itself it moves into
that which is pure and constant, and then it rests from wandering, being in
communion with what is real and constant. (79d)
Such is the philosophical life. When Socrates said at his trial that daily
to converse about virtue is the greatest good for a human being (38a), he
was instituting the ideal of the philosophical life. This is the life of
active, creative intelligence that is the proper aretê
(excellence, virtue) of a human being, that Plato variously calls Sophia, nous, phronêsis and identifies with alêtheia
(reality) because it is there and only there that we are in communion with
reality and ourselves attain reality.
IV
THE DIVINITY (ETERNITY) OF THE SOUL
What is commonly referred to as the ‘affinity argument’ (76d-84b) is of
much more import and value than being one in a series of arguments for
immortality. It is in a class by itself and is farther removed from having
the semblance or pretense of being a logical argument. It is more openly
poetical and emotional. In ascribing to the philosophical life and the
intelligible realities with which it is concerned all the characteristics
of divinity it amounts to a proclamation of the divinity of the soul.
Socrates says: If beauty and goodness and all such realities have being,
and if we discover these within ourselves, then our soul must have been
prior to our birth. (76d-e)— Though Socrates here is ostensibly
referring to temporal priority, yet beneath this we have the essental union
of the reality of the intelligible ideas and the reality of the soul
(mind), kai ei mê tauta, oude tade (76e). Socrates identifies the
soul with the intelligible realm, or more particularly, with the principle
of intelligence. At the core of this insight we find not the idea of
temporal continuity but that of supra-temporal eternity. This is a
creatively original metaphysical notion.
The philosophical soul is divine in being eternal in the only
metaphysically cogent sense of eternity — not as endless extension of time
or infinity of time but as the principle of creative activity that
transcends temporality in metaphysical reality. The philosophical soul
lives not in the fleeting world of shadows but has its being on the plane
of divine creative intelligence.
The full import of this comes out in the account ‘Diotima’ gives in the Symposium of the lover’s ascent to the vision of Beauty and is
also given succinctly in a prophetic passage in the Republic:
“ … a true philosophical nature aspires to reality (to on), does
not tarry by the many particulars that are supposed to be, but goes forth
with no blunting and no slackening of her desire, until she grasps the
essence of all reality by that in her soul to which it is becoming to grasp
that (that is, what is akin), approaching and mingling with what has true
being, gives birth to reason and reality; enjoys knowledge and true life
and is nourished, and then has relief of her birth pangs …” (490a-b).
V
THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHICAL THINKING
After Socrates had presented the affinity argument, both Simmias and Cebes
advanced objections. Simmias’s objection and Socrates’ answer are not
particularly relevant to this paper. (See the section “Harmony” in Chapter
Five of Plato: An Interpretation.) In answer to Cebes’s objection
Socrates says: “The whole question of the cause of generation and
corruption will have to be examined.” Then he adds, “I'm going to
relate to you my own experience about these” (95e-96a). When he does, it
turns out that that experience led him to renounce all search for physical
causes. He was convinced that no investigation of things outside the mind
can answer any of the questions that concerned him as a philosopher. We
will return to this crucial point further on but at the very outset we find
something that calls for pause.
Socrates says, “When I was young I was tremendously keen on that kind of
wisdom which they call investigation of nature ( tês sophias hên de kalousi peri phuseôs historian)” (96a). This is
in flat contradiction to what we have in the Apology where
Socrates emphatically denies ever engaging in or being interested in
physical investigation (19c). What are we to make of this? My own
conjecture is that Plato invents this early interest and the whole story of
Anaxagoras’s book to dramatize Socrates’ firm renouncement of physical
investigation. (That of course does not mean that Socrates did not read
Anaxagoras’s book.) Be that as it may. What is indubitable is that we have
in the sequel the clear radical separation of physical (scientific,
empirical) knowledge on the one hand and philosophical understanding on the
other hand.
Socrates exemplifies this radical difference. He is seated in prison on his
prison bed. Scientific investigation, giving an account of his position and
posture, will give us detailed descriptions of his bones and joints and
sinews and neurons. But all of that will not explain why he remains there
when his friends were prepared to arrange for his escape. Only his notions
of what is right and righteous can make us understand that. (98b-99a)
This is a distinction that both our scientists and our philosophers have
chosen to ignore. No investigation into things outside the mind can answer
an ultimate ‘What’ question or an ultimate ‘Why’ question. On the other
hand, no investigation into pure ideas can give us any factual knowledge
about how things are in the natural world. Among modern philosophers only
Kant saw this clearly. This is the gist of the principle of philosophical
ignorance. Socrates sums this by saying:
edoxe de moi chrênai eis tous logous kataphugonta en ekeinois skopein
tôn ontôn tên alêtheian
(99e). I give this crucial sentence in the original because it is highly
liable to corruption in translation. He says he thought he should have
recourse to ideas to search in them the — let me say, the reality of what
is real, tôn ontôn tên alêtheian, because it would be at best
confusing to speak of ‘the truth of things’.
Earlier at 96c-d he explains why he renounced investigation into things. “I
was so completely blinded by these studies … I forgot what I had formerly
believed I knew … about the cause of man's growth. For I had thought
previously that it was plain to everyone that man grows through eating and
drinking; for when, from the food he eats, flesh is added to his flesh and
bones to his bones, and in the same way the appropriate thing is added to
each of his other parts, then the small bulk becomes greater and the small
man large” (96c-d, tr. Fowler).
The explanation given of a human being’s growth sounds naïve, but it is of
the nature of all scientific explanation. No amount of sophistication will
change that nature. Modern science will give us a detailed description of
the development of a human child from a fertilized ovum, DNA and all, or
may go beyond that to the first appearance of a living organism. Similarly,
science may give us a detailed account of the coming into being and passing
away of a galaxy from Bang to Whimper. We deceive ourselves if we think
that explains anything or makes us understand anything. (See “Stephen
Hawking’s Bad Metaphysics”.) The credo of our modern religion is “Knowledge
is power”. Yes, science gives us power to manipulate nature and probably
eventually to wipe out the human race. But those who speak of science
explaining things or giving us understanding simply do not have the notion
of true understanding. Macbeth killed his king. The most comprehensive
account of every neuron in Macbeth’s brain will not make us understand why
he did it. Shakespeare bares Macbeth’s ambition and vainglory ans we
understand why.
Then comes a profoundly meaningful passage that our scholars and
professional philosophers have found it hard to appreciate:
“By Zeus, so far am I from thinking that I know the cause of such things,
that I will not even admit that when somebody puts one beside one, that
either the one to which the addition was made has become two, or that the
one added and that to which it was added, by the placing of the one beside
the other have become two, for I find it strange that when each of them was
separate from the other, each was one and they were not then two, but when
they approached each other, this was the cause for them to become two, the
togetherness of being placed beisde each other. Neither if somebody splits
one, can I yet be convinced that this again – the splitting – has been the
cause of the becoming of the two, this being the opposite of what was then
the cause of becoming two, for then it was the bringing them together and
placing each beside each, now it is the taking away and separating each
from each. …” (96e-97b).
This is the core of the notion of the intelligible idea ( idea, eidos). Let us imagine a man who has just had a terrible
shock and as a result has suffered total amnesia. There are trees around
him; to him they are just blots of colour, if they are even that. It is
only when a tree is singled out and named a tree that it becomes a tree for
him. Ideas are not found in things nor do they have any existence in the
world outside us. Two sticks lying side by side are just a stick and a
stick. It is only when a creative mind creates the idea of the series of
numbers and the ideas of the members of the series that the stick and stick
become two for us.
It is here (at 100c-d) that Socrates voices the insight “It is by Beauty
that all that is beautiful is beautiful” — an insight that was to be
re-affirmed by Plotinus ln saying that only a soul made beautiful can
appreciate beauty.
It is the ideas created by the mind and having no being other than in the
mind that give meaning to all things. The simplest perception iinvolves an
idea. A mere sensation is not a perception. (This is the cornerstone of
Kant’s transcendental system.) Hence Socrates further on says:
“You would loudly affirm that you do not know how else a thing becomes
(what it is) than by participation in the proper reality of whatever it
participates in, metaschon tês idias ousias hekastou hou an metaschêi, and that in
such cases you do not have any other cause of the becoming of 'two' but
participation in twoness, and that it is necessary for that which is to
become two to participate in this, and for that which is to become one to
participate in oneness” (101b-c).
VI
THE HOAX
In quoting the passage at 96e-97b above I cut out the last sentence because
that is quite another story. The passage concludes:
“Nor do I yet admit to myself that I know the cause of the becoming of one,
nor, in short, do I know of anything else through what it becomes or
perishes or is, according to this method of inquiry, but I concoct for
myself my own method, for that other I will in no way approach” (97b).
This is amplified further on where we read:
“What I am saying is this, nothing new, but what I have always both earlier
and in the present discussion never ceased to say. I will try to show you
the kind of cause I fashioned for myself, going back to what I have so
often been dinning and taking my start from that, laying down there is a
beautiful in itself and a good and a large and all other such, which if you
grant me and agree such things be, I hope from these causes to show and
discover that the soul is deathless.” (100b)
Here we have the very heart of the hoax. Plato here plays on the ambiguity
in the terms aitia (cause) and gignesthai (become). In
the authentic Socratic sense, the idea is the ‘cause’ of a thing ‘becoming
what it is for us’. The cause of a thing becoming what it is in itself is
the physical cause that Socrates abstains from looking for. The ‘kind of
cause’ Socrates concocted for himself is the principle of genuine
philosophical thimking. This involves the renouncement of investigation
into things, as giving no understanding, and confining philosophical
inquiry to the investigation of ideas, which alone gives answers to
genuinely philosophical questions. But Plato by what, if it were not
irreverent, we might call a sleight of hand, turns it into a method “to
show and discover that the soul is deathless”. We will see what this is
worth when we come to consider ‘the final argument’ for immortality.
In the first place, how could Plato make Socrates argue with so much
assurance for the survival of the soul, when in the Apology he had
made him distinctly express agnosticism on the question? (40c ff.) In Socrates’ Prision Journal (2006), “Day Twenty-Nine”, I reversed
the positions of Cebes and Simmias on the one side and Socrates on the
other side, making the two young men argue for survival and Socrates
checking them.
At 97b Socrates says plainly that he can no longer say that he knows the
cause of anything coming into being or perishing or continuing to be. Does
this not amount to a repudiation of all the ostensible arguments in the Phaedo? It tells us plainly that all the speculation earlier in
the dialogue about the cyclical character of genesis and about reminiscence
and the like, all that was mere play. Plato certainly wanted his readers to
examine and criticize such arguments. Plato often – to work his readers'
minds or as part of the dramatic ploy – purposely planted the faults and
inconsistencies that scholars ‘discover’ in the dialogues.
The gist of Socrates’ ‘autobiographical’ account is that, as a philosopher,
he is not concerned with the outside world. How can that be compatible with
any serious consideration of life in another world external to us?
Socrates’ conception of the nature of philosophical thinking makes any
knowledge of the external world beyond the reach of pure reason. This was,
strictly, Kant’s position. This was also the ground for Wittgenstein’s
insistence that we can make no statement about the World — a position that
Bertrand Russell failed to grasp because Russell as a confirmed Empiricist
and Pluralist could not entertain the conception of the metaphysical Whole.
(See Russell’s My Philosophical Development, 1959, p.86, quoted in
“The Wittgenstein Enigma”, The Sphinx and the Phoenix, 2009.)
The Phaedo comprises four arguments for the immortality of the
soul: the cyclical argument, the argument from reminiscence, the argument
from affinity, and the fourth argument, commonly regarded as the principal
argument. At no point does Plato claim or give the impression that any of
the proofs is conclusive or sufficient. Throughout the dialogue we have
broad hints that the arguments are not to be taken seriously. Simmias and
Cebes persistently raise objections and ask for reassurance. The final word
on the whole tissue of the arguments of the Phaedo is given by
Simmias in 107a-b: "I can't help still having in my own mind some disbelief
about what has been said”, to which Socrates responds approvingly and adds,
"also our first hypotheses, even if you find them acceptable, nevertheless
need to be examined more closely” (107b). This is in harmony with Plato’s
insistence in the Republic that dialectic must always undermine
the assumptions (hypotheses) of any philosophical statement. (533e)
After what I have been saying above it would be sheer mockery for me to
examine the Phaedo arguments in detail. After all, our learned
scholars have completely and repeatedly shredded to pieces not only these
arguments but all of Plato’s arguments and so-called doctrines and
theories. I have already taken up the affinity argument separately as an
integral aspect of Plato’s hymn of praise for the philosophical life. For
the cyclical argument and the argument from reminiscence the general
remarks above and the general comments on argument and proof below suffice.
Of the ‘final argument’ for the sake of which the special hoax in the
concluding part of Socrates’ ‘autobiography’ was purposely planted, let me
say this: When the method of argument from hypotheses comes to be applied
it turns out to be little more than playing with words, and even if the
conclusion – “the soul is dearhless” – is admitted, what ‘soul’ does the
argument address? Only the soul as the principle of life. Thus the
conclusion, if admitted, applies to the meanest bug in the same measure as
to Socrates, but that signifies nothing about the survival of personality.
It would be blasphemous to suppose that Plato could be blind to this. At no
point could Plato be in earnest about the arguments or expect them to
provide proof. The whole tissue of arguments, culminating in the ‘final
argument’, is the substance of the hoax.
The crucial notion of the intelligible as opposed to the perceptible realm,
the vision of the philosophical life and of the divinity of the soul, as of
the conception of the nature and scope of philosophical thinking are all
advanced without argument (in the narrower sense of the term) and without
proof. You can take it as a rule: where Plato argues most strenuously and
advances proofs and demonstrations, there he is least in earnest.
The whole series of arguments for immortality begins by defining death as
the separation and release of body from soul and of soul from body (64c).
This assumes the conception of a human being as made up of two separable
(not simply distinguishable) elements (79b.) All four arguments for
immortality in the Phaedo rest on this assumption and become
untenable once it is questioned.
For Plato, at the metaphysical plane of thinking, alêtheia, psuchê, nous, phronêsis are not distinct but are one and
the same thing. Despite all we hear about a soul separate or separable from
the body, in the profoundest Socratic-Platonic insight the soul is simply
the principle of intelligence, creative intelligence. Critics will tell me
I am creating my own Plato, a fictitious Plato: they would be right.
Everyone of us has his own Plato. If my Plato looks very different from the
Plato of erudition or from the Plato of Arostotle, so much the better. I do
not pretend to be a historian or an exegete. The Plato I portray is the
Plato that inspires my philosophy.
Platonism is not a philosophical system or a theory, but a vision, a vision
that can not and need not be proved or demonstrated but is oracularly
proclaimed, a prophecy announced in poetry and myth. The ground of the
Platonic vision is that the intelligible is the real, or, as Parmenides had
put it, intelligibility and reality are one and the same thing. The vision
is not arrived at by reasoning but is itself the ground of philosophical
reasoning.
Only dead abstractions call for proof and are amenable to proof. Genuine
philosophy creatively brings to birth visions clothed in myths that breathe
life into the shadows of the phenomenal world.
D. R. Khashaba
May 4, 2017
Posted to
https://philosophia937.wordpress.com
and http://khashaba.blogspot.com
