Read Online The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World by Daniel J. Boorstin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Daniel J. Boorstin
Ads: Link
which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. (Jowett trans.)
The cave becomes Plato’s stage for revealing the difference between his “real” world and the world of shadows which others have mistaken for reality. If anyone is “liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck around and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen only the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision. . . . will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”
So Plato urges us, too, to seek the changeless forms only crudely sensed in our shadowy sense experience. To describe objects in this changeless world, our English word “idea” is misleading. The Greek word
ideai
connotes “form.” But, while we think of “ideas” as somehow fleeting and unreal, for Plato the Idea was fully and permanently real. At the head of the hierarchy of ideas stands the Good, which plays the same role in the intelligible world that the sun plays in the visible. And it is not only grand ideas like the Good that have a static eternal reality. Even a humble object like a bed is a shadow of some static eternal Form.
Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say—for no one else can be the maker?
No.
There is another which is the work of the carpenter?
Yes.
And the work of the painter is a third?
Yes.
Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?
Yes, there are three of them.
God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.
Why is that?
Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the ideal bed and not the two others.
Very true, he said.
God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only.
What better refuge from the transient world of the senses?
Plato had created a new cosmology of Ideas, a secret universe of the mind. And so he gave absolute reality—in fact, the only reality—to the pure models. Taking off from the Socratic motto “Know thyself,” Plato had surprisingly led Seekers into another Other-World. But he had also set philosophers on a newly fertile path. While the physicists, the early Ionian philosophers, had looked only for beginnings, Plato, with his Theory of Ideas, set philosophers on a search for ends. And so he would show the way for his brilliant pupil Aristotle into vast new realms for Seekers of the following millennia.
8
Paths to Utopia: Virtues Writ Large
The other-world of Ideas was not much everyday help to the citizen or the practical politician. But Plato found another way of seeking that might provide earthly models as guides to virtue. In his longest and most influential dialogue,
The Republic,
Plato offered some specific this-worldly guidance. At the same time he created still another new literary form, the Utopia, depicting the ideal commonwealth. And just as homely analogies helped him explain his Theory of Ideas with his “three-tiered ontology” of the bed, he now made another simple analogy in search of the Good Society.
The English title of this dialogue, based on the Latin
res publica,
is incomplete. The Greek title
—The State, or On Justice—
makes it clear that the focus is on
The cave becomes Plato’s stage for revealing the difference between his “real” world and the world of shadows which others have mistaken for reality. If anyone is “liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck around and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen only the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision. . . . will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”
So Plato urges us, too, to seek the changeless forms only crudely sensed in our shadowy sense experience. To describe objects in this changeless world, our English word “idea” is misleading. The Greek word
ideai
connotes “form.” But, while we think of “ideas” as somehow fleeting and unreal, for Plato the Idea was fully and permanently real. At the head of the hierarchy of ideas stands the Good, which plays the same role in the intelligible world that the sun plays in the visible. And it is not only grand ideas like the Good that have a static eternal reality. Even a humble object like a bed is a shadow of some static eternal Form.
Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say—for no one else can be the maker?
No.
There is another which is the work of the carpenter?
Yes.
And the work of the painter is a third?
Yes.
Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?
Yes, there are three of them.
God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.
Why is that?
Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the ideal bed and not the two others.
Very true, he said.
God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only.
What better refuge from the transient world of the senses?
Plato had created a new cosmology of Ideas, a secret universe of the mind. And so he gave absolute reality—in fact, the only reality—to the pure models. Taking off from the Socratic motto “Know thyself,” Plato had surprisingly led Seekers into another Other-World. But he had also set philosophers on a newly fertile path. While the physicists, the early Ionian philosophers, had looked only for beginnings, Plato, with his Theory of Ideas, set philosophers on a search for ends. And so he would show the way for his brilliant pupil Aristotle into vast new realms for Seekers of the following millennia.
8
Paths to Utopia: Virtues Writ Large
The other-world of Ideas was not much everyday help to the citizen or the practical politician. But Plato found another way of seeking that might provide earthly models as guides to virtue. In his longest and most influential dialogue,
The Republic,
Plato offered some specific this-worldly guidance. At the same time he created still another new literary form, the Utopia, depicting the ideal commonwealth. And just as homely analogies helped him explain his Theory of Ideas with his “three-tiered ontology” of the bed, he now made another simple analogy in search of the Good Society.
The English title of this dialogue, based on the Latin
res publica,
is incomplete. The Greek title
—The State, or On Justice—
makes it clear that the focus is on
Similar Books
