The striking feature we shall still have to stress in the author of the dialogues is his ingeniousness. There is exceptional genius in the way the ideas about the Idea were conceived, and in the way they were expounded and passed on to the world. In an age of conflicting views on the authenticity of the historical tradition relative to fundamental facts about the dialogues, it may be hazardous to mention biographical items as circumstantial evidence of a similar exceptional character. But the traditional image handed down to posterity is that of an extraordinary personality. Mighty ambitions are at least visible from his earliest adolescence. He first seems to have made up his mind to become a great tragic poet, and this part of his life was intensely absorbed by the whole artistic environment so well known in Athens towards the middle of the fifth century. But then he met Socrates. And the encounter with this equally exceptional character obviously changed the whole trend of his ideas. Another most passionate ambition in Plato's life was not to leave him so quickly, however: throughout his life he was fascinated by the world of politics. Several times, it is said, he actually yielded to the temptation of entering a career as an active political leader. But outward circumstances do not appear to have been particularly favourable to his success here.
In another field, however, his genius was certainly destined to move the world. Professor Whitehead once formulated a saying which has become widely known:
The safest general characteristic of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of foot-notes to Plato.
A somewhat pointed statement, of course, but we have had to admit that there is a lot of truth in it.
But what shall we say, then, relative to current altercations on the authenticity of the whole Platonic tradition?
One of our professors one day asked us an apparently quite alarming question: "What would you say if some day it were actually proved that Plato wrote close to nothing of all the works traditionally attributed to him? Or worse still: that Plato never existed?"
There is no occasion for fear. The Plato with whom we must deal here, has certainly existed, no matter what the result of biographical studies may finally be. In fact, his life has visibly protracted itself from century to century. Perhaps he is more demonstratively alive today than he was in antiquity. So there is no reason whatsoever to despair of making out his identity, or pinpointing the very acts he has perpetrated during millennia. The master of Occidental idealism and spiritualism is not a mere dream that some sorcerer's trick would suffice to wipe away. The traces this giant of philosophy has left behind him, as he made this mighty stride down through the history of our Western World, are too deep and significant, indeed, for that.
In the old Oriental civilizations even a long time before Plato there had been a mystic yearning for devices that might efficiently overcome the hard concreteness of individual humanity. This was achieved by gradually emptying one's individual consciousness in the blessed nothingness of Nirvana. With Plato, now, this pleasing practice of losing one's disturbingly personal soul in the soothingly impersonal waves of an ocean called the One, found its peculiar Western variety. Our Occidental World had never experienced anything similar to this magic before. Perhaps the persuasive call from the East had just been a little too distant and unfamiliar for European ears to hear it, up to now. Perhaps it took nothing less than a genius of Plato's calibre to have it interpreted in a convincing manner. At least, as Dean Inge puts it, "The call once heard, has never long been forgotten in Europe."
Of course Plato is not everything in this movement. There is also a passive reason. That enormous influence exerted by his ideas on the entire subsequent trend of Western culture is partly due to an undeniable natural receptivity--or rather a mighty urge--right in the minds of those whom he was to influence so decisively.
In Platonic idealism there certainly was a forceful appeal to some secret aspirations found at the bottom of all intensely burning human hearts. Some centuries later this same irrepressible yearning for eternity was destined to be satisfied by the Christian message. So far, Plato's message must have been a tempting makeshift alternative. But Platonism is not Christianity. Particularly one element in Platonism makes it extremely different from Christianity. In the course of the Middle Ages a certain fusing together of the two was repeatedly attempted. Eiliv Skard says about the strange amalgamation which resulted, that it was perhaps the most important event in the entire history of our spiritual development ("vaar aandshistorie"). Personally we would insistently add that it is probably also the most fateful event of that history.
The element in Platonism which we have here referred to as entirely opposite to Christianity, and fateful to man's outlook on life, is just a certain "schizothyme" tendency of finding "real values" only in the mysterious depths of the inward. In the ruminative mind of the abstracting philosopher, the invisible things tend to present themselves as infinitely superior to anything that is visible. The next step is to actually despite all things which fall short of this invisible, general, theoretical nature, the things which have the bad chance of being just physical and outward. By and by, the world of the celestial Idea and the world of the terrestrial phenomenon become so distant from each other that no bridge can cover the gulf between them.
What is it, after all, that Plato has here introduced into Occidental thought? Lovejoy calls it otherworldliness (as distinguished from this-worldliness). We fear that an unqualified use of these terms may be highly misleading. Our Christian background provides us with--or should provide us with--a conception of "otherworldliness" which happens to be fundamentally different from that of Platonic idealism. In fact, the difference is exactly as great as that between the proud chill of philosophical intellectualism and the humble warmth of Christian spirituality.
Just what does Plato praise so boundlessly in the otherworldliness his Ideas stand for? Above all its total self-sufficiency (autarkeia):
The being who possesses good, always and everywhere and in all things, has the most perfect sufficiency, and is never in need of anything else. (- a remark by Socrates in Philebus, 60.--Jowett's transl., Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 7, p. 635)
Certainly not only the disciples of Socrates (including the ideal cynic Diogenes), but Socrates himself obviously had an eminent degree of this pride of self-containment, a maximum independence of outward things. And, in a world otherwise losing itself in stupid materialism, there is certainly much to admire in that rare attitude, and much to find positively startling. We need only recall Socrates's proverbial exclamation in front of a market-stand, loaded down with all kinds of widely coveted goods: "What pleasure to see so many things I do not need!" We shall presently see what enormous stress even
Aristotle lays on self-sufficiency. Generally speaking, his attitude is, of course, far from otherworldly in a Platonic sense. However, right on this world of empirical research and puzzling reality he has discovered something of "celestial sublimity"--the human soul! Nothing on earth can compare to the blissful superiority of a life in tranquil meditation! And where is the evidence of its crushing superiority? Just here: the intellectual man is the one most independent of material necessities for the carrying out of his splendid activity. He may even do without any assistants or associates:
One who is self-sufficient, can have no need of the service of others, nor of their affection, nor of social life, since he is capable of living alone. (Eth. Eudem., VII, 12b)
In fact, just this splendid self-sufficiency must be as close to the divine as anything can come. For notice what that sober-minded realist goes on to say in the same passage, venturing right into the field of theology, a realm in which he certainly lacks the prophetic rapture of his old teacher Plato:
This is especially evident in the case of God. Clearly, since he is in need of nothing, God cannot have need of friends, nor will he have any.
Of course, what strikes a reader from a Christian climate most of all in this text, is its rather inhuman impassibility. And in this respect the disciple's "theology" does not perhaps differ noticeably from that of his master. Plato, speaking about the person who has chosen the good life of thought and eternal wisdom, and praising the strange emotional equanimity (some would probably rather say the "emotional deadness") of that admirable hero among men, quotes Socrates as saying:
Then he will live without pleasure; and who knows whether this may not be the most divine of all lives. (Philebus, 33)
To this Protarchus replies dryly:
"If so, then the gods, at any rate, cannot be supposed to have either joy or sorrow."
Generally speaking, this supermundane type of self-sufficiency seems to imply a serious--almost painful--obligation to disengage oneself, entirely and at all costs, from everything that might be suspected of having the remotest affinity to the human weakness called emotions. In other words: to the whole Platonic spirit of otherworldliness there is a peculiarly strained necessity of presenting every one of its values in the most flagrant negation of anything that is manifestly human, and, for that very reason, condemned as this-worldly. The constant refrain ringing in our ears is, most certainly, the monotonous one of the Sage of the Upanishad: "No-no, you miserable man of this evil world here below, such is not the true reality of that other world!"
The logical conclusion to be drawn from this spiritualistic theory of values should be inescapable: The creation of this world of ours here below must have been a terrible mistake. What else could ever be inferred about a world so radically inferior--or downright antagonistic--to that other one, the eternally blessed world of the pure Idea. To create a world as hopelessly concrete as this one, must simply be an event of the utmost absurdity. Then, why was it created?
Here we must insert a little parenthesis about the Christian view-point, since Christian religion is the natural opposite to pagan philosophy: that the God of Christianity did proceed to that remarkable deed of creating things, is still fairly intelligible. For His main essence is not contained in self-sufficiency. According to the all-pervading spirit of the Gospel, God is precisely goodness--or Love.
To the frigidly rational spiritualism of Greek philosophy, however, that is of course a rather surprising quality in connection with gods. Love is a notorious passion, thus human rather than divine. But in the Bible there is nothing offensive in this as a capital epithet of God: God is good in the sense of loving. And His goodness is His greatness. But precisely that goodness of love makes creation a natural thing, an inevitable thing. To pour oneself out with unending lavishness--in favour of the other ones--this becomes a self-evident mode of expression to Inexhaustible Love, the welling source of eternal Life.
So not self-sufficiency, self-dependence, or self-seclusion, but rather self-diffusion becomes the appropriate quality to describe God's revelation of Himself. And to the Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages the axiom of goodness is naturally this: omne bonum est diffusivum sui. (Every good is self-diffusive.)
The principle of alterocentricity is so basic to divine essence that self-transcending fecundity simply becomes identical with God's revelation of Himself. This self-transcendency is nothing but the fundamental élan altérocentrique on the divine level.
We may try to make our particular perspective of a diametrical opposition between Platonic spiritualism and Christian spirituality more clear, precisely with reference to that sensational auto-transcendence which so naturally bears a world of creation:
All characteristic traits of the pagan Eros converge in its egocentricity. That is precisely its monomania of self-dependence (or self-sufficiency).
Now, let us admit at once: the God of Agape, the God of the Christian Gospel, is self-dependent, too, in a most objective sense of the term. In fact, He stands out as the only really Self-Dependent Being ever known. God is the Self -Existent One, but here the Gospel suddenly surprises man with its peculiar message. That God of perfect Sovereignty, of total Independence, "thought it not a robbery" to be independent. No, He found His great joy, His supreme glory, in an extreme dependence.
His incredible idea was to make Himself dependent--dependent on the other ones. What other ones? The most deeply fallen. So precisely those needing Him most. He had the incredible idea of needing them. Imagine: those who were most desperately dependent on Him--He takes it into His mind to make Himself dependent on them. This is the supreme peak of alterocentricity: the One who was not of this world, made Himself of this world. And He eternally insists on this remarkable "this-worldliness". The idea of divine incarnation, that is the extreme this-worldliness! It is the eternal mystery of a God who comes down to dwell among men. This is the truly spiritual wisdom of Agape--to the Greeks utter foolishness.
For what is the essence of Greek spiritualism at the apogée of Plato's philosophizing splendour? It is entirely different. Just consider the genius of that idealist prophet emerging to unfold the striking message of his most extraordinary theory. Of course, in reality that theory of the Idea--in a proper environment of pagan thought--is not so strikingly extraordinary at all. In fact, it is too fundamentally pagan, pagan through and through, to be really extraordinary. Plato only introduces into our World of the West what had existed for ages in more ancient civilizations of human history: that is, the inexorable extremism of a genuinely pagan "other-worldliness".
It is as a visionary portrayer of this "other world" that Plato has become exceedingly famous. But what, then, in Plato's theory of "the other world" is so outstanding as to merit such exceeding fame?
Historically it has its connections with theories in the past. Still it is an astonishingly new theory to the West. Subsequent centuries here must have considered it with an ever new and ever increasing stupefaction. No intelligent historian could help being impressed by the transforming influence exerted by Plato's voice in our culture; that is a penetrating voice proclaiming the message of an "other-worldliness" more glacial in its essence than perhaps anything else devised by Occidental man at any time.
But if the Platonic take-off for an "other world" is stupefying, there is in the development of his philosophy a special maneuver, at a certain moment, that is almost more stupefying still. In fact, there is, in the history of Platonic authorship, a high-point to which rather few historians have paid due attention, in view of the equally heavy influence it has probably exerted on the European history of ideas. That was a sudden descent toward "this world here below", in fact, a descent just as glacial as the preceding ascent, and we would dare to say: hardly less devoid of sound human sense either fair.
Love-joy has mentioned the weird two-sidedness in Plato's formidable impact upon our world of thought in some clear and attention-stirring terms:
The most notable--and the least noted--fact about his historic influence is that he did not merely give to European otherworldliness its characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic, but that he also gave the characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic to precisely the contrary tendency--to a peculiarly exuberant kind of this-worldliness.[1]
We think it should immediately be added that it was probably very much in spite of himself that Plato came to exert any actual influence upon the future world in a genuinely this-worldly direction. The true character of that this-worldliness should be more closely studied.
But the mere fact that he even got to the point where he finally found he had better come "down to earth", is something so sensational that it would seem almost incredible how it could be by-passed comparatively unnoticed. One explanation may be, we think, that with Plato even this final "down-to-earth" diving is a feat performed with such originality that it may come pretty close to a sleight-of-hand movement. Moreover, the whole strange pageantry of dialogue partners opposing each other, as well as unexpected changes from myth to fact, and then back to myth again, would be likely to have a considerably bewildering effect on almost any reader.
Anyway, hardly has Plato climbed to the glorious summit of those dazzling Ideas, so radically different from anything we know in our shadowy regions here below (namely just that dismal Cave he describes with superb masterfulness in the Republic) when, suddenly, in the dialogue described as the natural continuation of the Republic--Timaios--he places us face to face with a highly incongruous train of ideas.
To the average modern reader this latter work must certainly appear, to a large extent, as dull, antiquated, superstitious "trash". But we should notice that it was rather unanimously considered as one of the most influential of Plato's dialogues all the way up to quite modern times. And to the serious student of Platonism--we mean Platonism as a living, historical reality in the destiny of Occidental culture--it must still remain a document of the greatest interest.
What, then, do we find in this--from a modern viewpoint--most boring and nonsensical discourse on the creation of the world, delivered by a certain Timaios, a Roman official among the most wealthy and high-ranking in his community, and a man who has "scaled the heights of all philosophy" (Tim., 20)? Well, that discourse actually represents nothing less than Plato's compulsory "home journey" from the sublime heavens of the Idea down to that shadowy world of terrestrial concreteness and sordid temporality, which one might have thought completely ruled out and forgotten long ago.
Why on earth does the radically spiritualistic philosopher think it inevitable, after all, to face the painful facts of this dismal world? It is difficult to find more than one really sensible explanation. There must have been, in the secret depths of his heart, a sort of "this-worldly" realism left behind, and simply forcing him, by and by, to attempt a definitive account of the most unaccountable fact: there is a world of becoming. That world presents itself--shall we say: it presents itself ostentatiously and shamefacedly--side by side with the world of eternal ideas. Why is there such a world? How did it manage to come into existence? Sincerely, we are excitedly anxious to hear what reason Plato can suggest for such an existence. What is the cause? For it certainly must have a cause.
That which is created must ... of necessity be created by a cause. (Tim., 28)
There is "a father and maker of all this universe," although his nature is "past finding out". Also the "patterns" which that "artificer" must have applied when he framed the world, confront us with serious questions. Just how did he do it? And, perhaps most important of all, why did he do it?
Well, here comes the great and stirring passage, in Timaios:
Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generations. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. (Tim., 29)
Here then something outstandingly remarkable, something epoch-making, has happened: the absolutely and eternally Self-Sufficient Idea stoops down to the radically irrational act of calling into existence things outside itself, things of which it does not have the slightest need, and to which it should not have the remotest relationship. And Plato sets about rationalizing that fundamentally irrational process. What "reason" does he find? He finds this one: the Supreme Being was good. That implies being free from passion of any kind, so also from the passion of envy. Consequently he was--shall we say--"defenceless" against the curious fact of this external world coming into existence!
Our question here becomes unavoidable. At least, we cannot see how it could ever be avoided: Has not Plato's God been changed by this from an absolutely self-sufficient God into a self-transcending God--in fact, something very close to the self-diffusive and actually self-sacrificing God of Christianity?
We would answer, yes and no, particularly no!
We admit that the sudden revisionary movement, undertaken here by Plato, on first view bears some striking resemblance to what we observed a moment ago in the core of Christian theology, in the Christian doctrine of God. A complete reversal in Plato's customary position, regarding his Idea, is demonstrable. The incongruous and irrational character of his "new theology" is indisputable. Plato himself implicitly--and in certain passages of Timaios even quite explicitly--admits the creation of this visible world; and notice, as an inevitable outcome of some quality of goodness in the Invisible One! Of course, we shall have to submit that "goodness" there to a somewhat closer examination.
Right away, however, we should be in a position to state what ought to be the full consequences of Plato's revision: if, now after this, he should still go on despising the world of creation as nothing but a vain shadow flickering miserably and ghostlike against the horizons of a higher and only reality,[2] then, indeed, that could only happen through an incongruity and an irrationality of thought for which there is no excuse nor attenuation whatsoever.
But we should not be so quick to assume that any real change has taken place in Plato's position--nor in the position of Jesus Christ, as observed a moment ago, for that matter: Pagan spiritualism is unchangeable. And so is Christian spirituality. The type of "goodness" Timaios speaks about, in a desperate attempt to account for the existence of a visible world, remains eternally the same. And so does the type of "goodness" the Bible speaks about, with reference to its peculiar cosmogony. And, compared to each other, those "goodnesses" are as distant as the east is from the west. What is the difference between them?
We would say the "goodness", which, according to Timaios, prevented his god from having any sordid jealousy, distinguishes itself as being precisely automatic. The absence of passion ("passion" in the sense of suffering, the "most abominable" thing spiritualism has ever known) is nothing but sheer impassibility, the formidable ideal of frigid idealism, and equally of a paralyzing pessimism all the way from Buddha to Schopenhauer! We have called this frigidity automatism. How sensible minds can adore that total negation of life and liberty is incomprehensible. For it is an absurd yearning for a state of downright nothingness. It is the very opposite of the living person's active consciousness, involving personal conscience and personal responsibility.
The symptomatic fact, then, is this: with Plato, as with all other spiritualists, goodness (the "highest good") and automatism remain for ever synonyms. But of course "goodness" in this emaciated sense is a far cry from goodness in a Christian sense.
Notice, however, in Timaios, the causes alleged for the coming into existence of a material world: they are typically passive, glacially "permissive", barrenly automatic causes. The idea is unmistakable: God was without jealousy. He had no "passionate counter-arguments" available. So how could He prevent the creation of an external world-indeed a world "as similar as possible to himself, in all things?" (Tim., 29). The "green light" is given. God has no valid objection. The world can come into existence. The world must come into existence. Full stop.
The cosmogonic causes released by divine revelation in the biblical record are fundamentally different from this. They are typically active, heartily urgent, eminently personal causes: the heart of the great "I AM" was overflowing with goodness, goodness in a different sense, goodness in the sense of upwelling love, a love transcending the borders, a living love that no force can stop from exteriorizing itself. So it was nothing less than a dynamic passion of self-transcendence that urged the God of the Bible, irresistibly, towards the act of creation. And this creative dynamism is nothing but Jesus Christ Himself, the Master of generation and regeneration. In other words, what is the evidence that this Creator of new worlds is essentially identifiable with Agape, the élan altérocentrique par excellence on the divine plane? Simply His ineffable decision to become flesh Himself. So ardent was His urge to come to the rescue of those dear "other ones", beings "outside Himself", whom He had voluntarily and spontaneously called into existence, that He went to the extreme of making Himself dependent on them--nothing less than that!
So this is, indeed, a diffusio sui which has nothing to do with any blind necessity, with any Godforsaken automatism in the sense of spiritualist impassibility. At every moment the God of Christianity maintains His inalienable quality of sovereign volitional freedom. What superior meaning would a creative intervention have if not that one?
The course that Plato takes to the creation of a visible world is devoid of meaning. For he endeavours to account for its existence through phrases inspired by "pure reason", a logical barrenness that would chill any living universe to death. That is, the nonsense of "pure being". On the contrary, it has to be ascribed to some kind of a most personal intervention--an intervention on the part of goodness, granted, but what kind of goodness? Certainly a very different one from that known by Plato.
But you need not be a sagacious philosopher to realize one sober fact: the concrete existence of a world your eyes can see and your hands can feel at any time; this is something that does not devolve "automatically" from any pre-existent cause of so-called "pure being".
The "creator" whom Plato knows is by no means the one who could be expected to create at all. He is not a God filled with irresistible yearnings outward, a yearning for other beings than himself, beings upon whom he can squander his infinite tenderness and fatherly care, a God whose essence is to give Himself, as only persons can give themselves; and divine Persons, above all.
No, indeed, precisely from Plato's point of view there ought to be every good reason why particular things (the "phenomenal counterparts") should not come into existence. His "god" ought to have most legitimate motives for just "begrudging", in his peculiar impassive way, the "shameless" emergency of any this-worldly things.
What he now actually states, however, is that the rise into existence of what our senses perceive around us was not only a logical event, but a necessary one. Perhaps this is not so strange after all, considering the philosopher's usual bent. The automatic is always necessity in its most fatal sense.
Of course, it would be most congenial with the idealist's deepest mood not to make any allowance at all for the existence of concrete things. But no man in the long run, could just explain them away, or bluntly deny them. He was bound to give some explanation of their being there. The logical theorist has the duty to explain things.
And that explanation was bound to be a rigidly logical one. So when the creator resorted to the--shall we say--strange business of generation, then that too had to present itself as a logical necessity; in other words, something devolving--with usual stringent inevitability--from certain rigid principles of pure reason.
Anyway, Plato does make heroic efforts to lend maximal philosophical dignity and logical verisimilitude to his sensational new theory that the visible world is a logical and necessary derivative from the Ideal World.
This is no negligible event in the history of idealism. From now onwards the temporal world of becoming should certainly be invested with a definite "legitimate status". It has finally taken its legitimate place beside the World of Being--as nothing less than a logical and inexorable requirement. By whom was it so logically and inexorably required? By the eternal World of Pure Being!
We are not so much concerned about the confusion this ideological reversal was bound to cause in the minds of infatuated Plato admirers down through the generations, although the situation here must have been pregnant with the potency of most serious forthcoming "heresy". Just think of the theoretical implications: the celestial Idea, the only reality officially recognized heretofore, in some way begins to vindicate, as her legitimate and indispensable property, something awfully strange, namely her beloved terrestrial counterpart, the once miserable "shadow". What a sensational love story in the history of spiritualist metaphysics!
No wonder that uneasy disciples down through the centuries tended to get somewhat embarrassed and confused. Particularly in the brains of quite common mortals, the relations between "reality" on one hand, and "shadow" on the other, were liable to tend towards getting mixed up a little; and this is just what happened. Even to the high-brow elite of respectable dualist orthodoxy, a potential hotbed for heterodox viewpoints was here afforded. The alternative of "heretical" thinking, most temptingly left to work upon their minds, was this: What if rather the very abstraction (that most venerable Idea, Herself) should, in the end, turn out to be the pitiable "shadow"! Indeed, why not? In that case those concrete objects our senses perceive, here and now, would be the realities we can depend on. The Idea is a chimera of the brain, just representing, in a vague and symbolic way, the real world we have within the grasp of our hands.
Perhaps we shall never know in detail the serpentine trail of this section of the history of ideas. Who could ever tell the precise reason why serious heresy suddenly sprang up in the mind of such a pupil as Aristotle? What we do know, through the public testimony of Timaios, is the fact that obvious inconsistencies threatened to explode the logical coherence of Platonic spiritualism as a whole.
Would it be too daring to imagine that such inconsistencies may have been objects of oral teaching in the Academy at an early stage, or at least a combustible material for fiery discussions among groups of particularly combative disciples? This theory does not seem to be without merit.
Anyway, Timaios is an historical certainty. For good or for evil? That may be a matter of opinion, and of individual philosophical bent. Some may be inclined to ask: Why not rejoice wholeheartedly at this lucky inconsistency of Platonic thought? What could be wrong about an occasional side-leap, even right in the heart of weird Platonic speculation, into tracks of sober-minded, childlike realism? Would not that afford some reason to hope that spiritualist philosophy can still develop towards trends of genuine humanity--perhaps even a spirituality of the Christian type?
We seriously fear that an optimism of that magnitude is unwarranted and vain. What Plato adds in his Timaios is but a superstructure, artificial and more like a foreign body than anything else. It may simulate a certain integration of mind and matter. Nevertheless the general trend of the thinking remains substantially dualistic. Above all it remains too frigidly intellectualistic to make place for any true spirituality in the deepest human sense; that is, a spirituality of the Hebraic and Christian pattern.
Besides, any realistic outcome here is seriously endangered by a more or less fantastic mythological setting. The whole declaration tends to become mainly verbal. Its realism is not held in any firm terms of a serious commitment. It might at any moment be treacherously disavowed. With no more binding engagement than this, it is so easy for the author to back out. The whole thing may be explained away as merely some poetic symbol.
Moreover, Plato's "ideological reversal" here would still be limited to the cosmological realm. Would that suffice to bring about a genuine integration of mind and matter? What then about the anthropological realm, the most serious of all? We shall presently have a closer look at Plato's dualistic views on man. Without a profound "ideological reversal" here as well, there would be no hope anyway of any true synthesis. What is demanded is a thorough-going process of integration right in the core of everyday human life. That is what we call a genuinely spiritual trend towards wholeness and harmony in the world that really matters to man. Plato's "reconciliation" of the "two worlds" in Timaios is nothing but a half-hearted modus vivendi. It is merely a question of spirit and matter trying to get along together as best they can. There is no lasting and reliable improvement in the troubled relations previously conjured up between the two "antagonists". And what would be the true result of their recent "agreement of coexistence"? To a man so seriously affected by the fatal illness of spiritualism as Plato that would only mean the entry into a more chronic stage of his old and henceforth incurable nostalgia for the dreamland of Pure-Soulism, a Utopia far beyond any shores of our immediate mind-body reality.
We are more than anxious to make an inquiry into Plato's dualism of man. But then we must first have a still closer look at his dualism of the world.
Clearly enough, Plato's public profession in his Timaios is that of "bridge-builder". He professes to build reliable bridges across bottomless gulfs. But of course no one could be more efficient in preventing bridges from being built than just a professional bridge-builder (or let us rather say a professing bridgebuilder). For he may say with a certain authority, "Take a warning from my experience, folks, I once tried to build a bridge in this place. It is an impossible task."
The elaborate account Plato has endeavoured to give of the legitimate existence of created things, was doomed to remain unconvincing, and for very good reasons. First, it was a creation which only seems to have one coldly premeditated, purely metaphysical purpose: namely that of producing the sad shadowlike counterpart, in this bleak world of nature here below, of the true and only worthwhile realities in the high heavens above. Such a creation is bound to remain a pitiable and highly enigmatic event, indeed, an unworthy event, both from an intellectual and from a spiritual point of view.
But what is particularly wrong about it--hopelessly wrong, with regard to meaningfulness--is this: in the last analysis the relation between Idea and World (between Creator and creation) here turns out to be a relation of the purest automatism, an absolutely inexorable automatism.
To us this is a capital objection. In fact, this automatism imposes itself upon our observation as an essential characteristic of Platonic philosophy all along. We would go still farther in our general statement: automatism is the essential characteristic of all philosophical idealism, of all spiritualism in this world. This reveals itself in the distinctive features of all fundamental paganism: it is infallibly the conception of a most rigorous automatic function. (For a further and more detailed expose, see our Vol. III, Chapter II, a, The Concept of Order Versus Disorder.)
But is this automatism what really comes out in Plato's philosophy, even where he has the humanly sympathetic whim of introducing created things as an acceptable "reality", namely in Timaios?
Exactly so. According to Timaios, the existence of this phenomenal world here below can be justified in only one way: it must be explained in terms of the coldest logical necessity. There must be an imperative demand, an inflexibly binding law; to the invisible Ideas something must be constantly granted: their visible counterparts. Of course those counterparts are still infinitely inferior to the glorious reality above. They are still just the "shadow", but please notice: an indispensable shadow, an inevitably appearing shadow.
But now our pertinent little question: What sense could there be in a correspondence between world and Idea as mutually inflexible, and as fatally automatic, as that of one inexorably demanding the other all the time? We are obliged to confess that we have not been able to discover the sense of it, either spiritually or logically speaking. Let us keep to logic.
Here one thing must be remembered: the Ideas are from eternity. This is their tacit, self-evident prerogative in all consistent spiritualism. Their elementary dignity as Ideas would demand nothing less. The very opposite is the case with their phenomenal replicas in the lower world, the world of tangible things. These have an equally self-evident criterion: they take place in time.
So it must be legitimate for a poor naive to ask--out of sheer curiosity, or even sincere anxiety for that matter--how did those lonesome Ideas manage to exist without their respective temporal shadows prior to the incident of creation? Indeed, that must have been an endlessly long while to get along without one's beloved counterparts--one's absolutely necessary and logically devolving counterparts! (Here we have simply taken our point of departure in the assumption which must be taken for granted, from the moment of Timaios on: the shadows are no longer looked upon as a set of merely contingent accidents, but in fact as cold, logical necessities. The ideal realities of the higher world simply do not attain to their due perfection without them.)
One probable answer to our naive attack might be that Plato did not always envisage the relation between Idea and world in terms of a constant and logically ineluctable reciprocity.
Granted--but that rather amounts to saying that he did not always envisage it, short and sweet. More clearly expressed: for a long time he failed to face it. At the moment when he begins to face it, really and seriously, he sees himself obliged to abandon himself just to that implacable rigidity of an automatic, unbreakable tie.
And in what other way would you expect any genuine idealist to consider the matter? Within the frame-work of idealism this is a consideration of the most reasonable, the most strictly logical.
Yet that nice logical consistency (as things may appear if viewed from the inside), does not save idealism itself. It is already at the very moment when the idealist enters his idealism that he finds himself in a blind alley. For no man can close himself off from his outside reality so completely that reality concerns him no more.
Let us open our mind to the dilemma facing the idealist reasoner in the present case. Let us sincerely try to understand it wholly and fully: by sheer virtue of his own logical consistency the idealist of Timaios has concluded that the world is just as indispensable to the Idea as the Idea is to the world. If, however, he thus admits that mutual relations as close and inexorable as these do exist between type and antitype, then it could only happen through an unpardonable lack of equal logical consistency that he refuses to admit that one is bound to be co-eternal with the other!
In other words: the most visible, most palpable things of this world would be supposed to have, according to the supreme triumph of Platonic automatism in Timaios, something essential in common with the invisible, impalpable things of the other world; they are viewed as being from eternity.
And, phénomène bizarre, that piece of logic does not astonish us so much after all. More or less "religious" varieties of Platonic idealism (making the human soul and its eternal destiny its particular topic of interest) have now for such a long time stressed the theory that "the essential part" of man is divine. So, if experts finish by discovering some day that "the other parts" of him, too, are actually divine, one is no longer so doctrinaire in one's resistance even against that "new progress" of anthropological science.
Do you see what famous kind of theory of God is here entering upon the scene? Pantheism!
The following is an empirical fact of the history of ideas, we may safely say: where the idealism and spiritualism of pagan philosophy have made their way for some time, there pantheism, as a sort of "religious" conviction, will faithfully follow their traces.
And what does this pantheism of pagan philosophy and pagan sham-religion represent, as regards the conservation of ideals of totality in our Western culture? We have entered upon a program of research in that field in our third volume of Man, the Indivisible. Here we shall limit ourselves to stating: pantheism represents not an integration of the ideal and the real, but a confusion of the two.
But what is the cause for this mere attempt at an integration, which only ends in sad confusion? In our opinion the cause is clear: it is just the great Automatism--automatism erected as the supreme principle, an axiomatic principle. That is the "axiom" paralyzing every human endeavour from arriving at the synthesis, a sensible integration of all things seen and lived.
For that automatism, carried to its last "logical" consequence, constitutes the simple negation of all meaning, all perfection, all life--briefly all reality. Automatism is the ultimate blockage of all reasonable reasoning.
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