Read Online The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Freeman
Tags: History
Ads: Link
Plato goes on to argue that concepts such as justice, beauty and good are similar to mathematical proofs in that they also exist as eternal truths (“Forms”), independent of the material world. He readily acknowledged the difficulty in grasping these Forms. Few had the intellectual and reasoning power required to conquer their “desire” and “spirit” and set out on the arduous intellectual journey required. In the
Phaedo
Plato talks condescendingly of “the lovers of spectacles and lovers of sounds, who delight in fine voices and colours and shapes, and everything that art fashions from that sort of thing . . . but their minds are incapable of seeing and delighting in the nature of the Beautiful itself . . .” In other words, the reasoning part of their souls is incapable of asserting its power over the other parts. Those who had the intellectual ability to understand the Forms should be selected when children and trained over many years in the use of reason. They (and Plato was unusual for his times in including women as well as men) would gradually come to develop an understanding of the Forms, until finally, after many years of intense reflection, their true and eternal nature would be revealed.
Yet when they had grasped the Forms and the eternal truths enshrined in them, the task of the intellectual elite, “the Guardians,” as Plato termed them, was just beginning. It was they who would take on the task of running society according to their knowledge of the nature of justice, good and similar concepts. They were, as Plato put it, like doctors who knew what was best for their patients and were thus justified in overruling the patients’ own beliefs about their illnesses. If anyone resisted them, the Guardians were justified in exiling or even, according to Plato’s late work the
Laws,
executing them.
The search for an understanding of the Forms, as well as the implementation of them, required absolute dedication, and those selected to undertake it must not let themselves be diverted by emotion or rhetoric. Plato’s world was one in which there was little place for spectacle, theatre or the arts (a beautiful object could only be a pale imitation of the Form of Beauty), spontaneity or sexual passion. The
Laws,
in particular, written when his idealism appears to have soured, seems to demand a joyless society. However, for Plato the achievement of knowledge of the Forms was such a satisfying task in itself that it would transcend any knowledge of the world apparent to the senses. He went further; knowledge gained of the Forms was so significant that observations of the actual world should be disregarded if they were in conflict with the reality of the Forms. “We shall approach astronomy, as we do geometry, by way of problems,
and ignore what’s in the sky
[my italics], if we intend to get a real grasp of astronomy,” as he puts in
The Republic,
his most famous work, on the nature of good government. 10
This amounted to a direct attack on the mainstream scientific tradition of Greek thought, which relied, as we have seen, on empirical observation. While Plato stressed that the Forms could be grasped only through reason, was it in fact possible to use reason to prove that the Forms, indeed a whole world of unchanging immaterial “objects” beyond this one, actually existed? Even if it were, how was it possible to be sure that anyone had grasped the Form of, say, “the Good” correctly, and how were disputes to be resolved if there were rival interpretations? In practice, Plato’s assertion that such conflict was impossible because all those who grasped a Form would agree on its nature seems untenable. The fundamental, and perhaps fatal, weakness of Plato’s philosophy lies in the difficulties of finding axiomatic foundations from which the nature of a Form of, for example, Beauty can be deduced. Without axioms proper reasoning was impossible, and in terms of practical politics it needed only a
Phaedo
Plato talks condescendingly of “the lovers of spectacles and lovers of sounds, who delight in fine voices and colours and shapes, and everything that art fashions from that sort of thing . . . but their minds are incapable of seeing and delighting in the nature of the Beautiful itself . . .” In other words, the reasoning part of their souls is incapable of asserting its power over the other parts. Those who had the intellectual ability to understand the Forms should be selected when children and trained over many years in the use of reason. They (and Plato was unusual for his times in including women as well as men) would gradually come to develop an understanding of the Forms, until finally, after many years of intense reflection, their true and eternal nature would be revealed.
Yet when they had grasped the Forms and the eternal truths enshrined in them, the task of the intellectual elite, “the Guardians,” as Plato termed them, was just beginning. It was they who would take on the task of running society according to their knowledge of the nature of justice, good and similar concepts. They were, as Plato put it, like doctors who knew what was best for their patients and were thus justified in overruling the patients’ own beliefs about their illnesses. If anyone resisted them, the Guardians were justified in exiling or even, according to Plato’s late work the
Laws,
executing them.
The search for an understanding of the Forms, as well as the implementation of them, required absolute dedication, and those selected to undertake it must not let themselves be diverted by emotion or rhetoric. Plato’s world was one in which there was little place for spectacle, theatre or the arts (a beautiful object could only be a pale imitation of the Form of Beauty), spontaneity or sexual passion. The
Laws,
in particular, written when his idealism appears to have soured, seems to demand a joyless society. However, for Plato the achievement of knowledge of the Forms was such a satisfying task in itself that it would transcend any knowledge of the world apparent to the senses. He went further; knowledge gained of the Forms was so significant that observations of the actual world should be disregarded if they were in conflict with the reality of the Forms. “We shall approach astronomy, as we do geometry, by way of problems,
and ignore what’s in the sky
[my italics], if we intend to get a real grasp of astronomy,” as he puts in
The Republic,
his most famous work, on the nature of good government. 10
This amounted to a direct attack on the mainstream scientific tradition of Greek thought, which relied, as we have seen, on empirical observation. While Plato stressed that the Forms could be grasped only through reason, was it in fact possible to use reason to prove that the Forms, indeed a whole world of unchanging immaterial “objects” beyond this one, actually existed? Even if it were, how was it possible to be sure that anyone had grasped the Form of, say, “the Good” correctly, and how were disputes to be resolved if there were rival interpretations? In practice, Plato’s assertion that such conflict was impossible because all those who grasped a Form would agree on its nature seems untenable. The fundamental, and perhaps fatal, weakness of Plato’s philosophy lies in the difficulties of finding axiomatic foundations from which the nature of a Form of, for example, Beauty can be deduced. Without axioms proper reasoning was impossible, and in terms of practical politics it needed only a
Similar Books
