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I’m driving home from a talk that AE Robbert just gave at The Alembic in Berkeley. Adam’s a good friend of mine, and he’s finishing up a dissertation on the role of askēsisor training/exercise/practice in philosophy. He’s reading a lot of Pierre Hadot, and thinking about the ways that thinking, perceiving, and the cultivation of attention are really at the core of philosophy.
I’m now thinking about a question I asked Adam about Plato, and the way that Plato is usually read as a dualist, as a two world theorist. Adam mentioned that the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy has Plato as the first name under the entry for dualism. It’s true that there is a theory of dualism in some of Plato’s dialogues. But the thing I always say is: Plato wrote dialogues. He didn’t compose doctrines. He didn’t leave us with a system. He left us with a series of conversations and opportunities for conversion. Conversion is a word that Adam was really trying to focus on for us, to unfold its significance.
I’ve titled this: Plato and Platonism, Dividing the Line and Completing the Circle. The divided line is in the Republic as a diagram of Plato’s theory of knowledge.
Draw a horizontal line, bisect it with a vertical line, not exactly through the middle, and then bisect each half again. On the left side of this vertical line is the sensible realm, and on the right side is the intelligible realm. You can further divide the sensible side into opinions and beliefs—all the stuff that people say they believe in (doxa). And then even further towards the left from that is just sensory particulars, sense data. These are basically a nothing, nearest to non-being. And then on the right of this divided line, you first get dianoia, which would be mathematics, scientific hypotheses, and logic and whatnot. And then to the right of that is noesis, which goes beyond the art of dialectics and mathematics to become contemplation. Noesis implies becoming one with the object of thought. In other words, the subject and the object are no longer split.
The usual story of Plato’s theory of knowledge, this divided line, is that it’s a kind of ladder that you’re supposed to climb out of the sensible realm on. You start chained to the sensible realm, and you’re supposed to turn 180 degrees to face the One, to face the Good, and to contemplate the Truth of eternal ideas. So you get this caricature, I think, of Plato, if you only go this far, if you only make the 180 degree turn away from the sensible toward the intelligible. You get a false picture of Platonism. The full picture requires completing the circle: you have to do the whole 360 degree turn and come back again to the sensible realm, to see it in the light of the Good as a shining expression and display of the ideas. You come back to your senses, informed by the Good, and you re-inhabit bodily life.
That is really what the philosophic life was about for Plato. It is what the contemplative life, as Adam was sharing with us, is all about. It is not just ascetic, it’s also aesthetic: there’s a turning back to the world to see it as Beautiful and so as a reflection of the Truth, which itself is made possible by the Good.
Like Adam, I’ve been spiritually formed by my reading of the Platonic dialogues. I find it unfortunate that his work is so often caricatured. It’s important to be able to inherit the Platonic tradition aright, and not just inherit it as something to be negated (especially if it’s only a caricature that is being negated!). Adam and his dialogue parter last night,
Erik Davis, discussed Foucault’s relationship to Pierre Hadot. Hadot was uncomfortable with Foucault’s takeaway from his work on the history of philosophy as spiritual exercise. Foucault is a good example of a kind of anti-Platonist. There’s also Foucault’s friend, Gilles Deleuze. Now, I know Deleuze way better than Foucault, and at least with his anti-Platonism there’s a kind of recharging and rediscovery of Plato rather than a simple negation. Deleuze writes favorably about Plato’s method of division and the way in which, in Plato’s dialogues, the science of categorization had not yet reached the syllogistic perfection of Aristotle’s logic. In Plato’s texts, there’s always a myth at the end of the dialectics that provides the missing wholeness that in some way synthesizes the positions which had been at odds in the dialogue. But this synthesis is not achieved discursively, but in some kind of intuitive way.
So you don’t just turn around to face the intelligible, but you come back into the sensible, informed by the reality of the eternal ideas. Or, in different terms, we could say you return to the material world informed by the underlying reality of Spirit. Matter is then not simply an illusion or a nothing. It only becomes an illusion when we try to make it exist in a self-subsistent way, as if independent of any intelligible ground or realm of ideas or spiritual reality. Matter only becomes illusory if we think that it exists on its own. If we recognize it as the display, the expression, the incarnation of Spirit, then it’s quite real and it’s quite Beautiful, and Good, and True, too.
You already get something like this completion of the circle in Plotinus, with his sense of emanation and overflowing of the One down to matter, followed by the return. But it’s just not as clear as I would want in Plotinus that matter isn’t evil. I think Plotinus gets a little too close to rejecting the body. Bodily life gets recovered a little bit in Iamblicus and Proclus. But this is why I’m so drawn to Whitehead’s neoplatonism, because I think he fully completes the circle. He’s not stuck in 180 Platonism but realizes the full 360 conversion.
[I had a speaker request from Brett, who began to chime in now]
“Hey, is that Brett?”
“Hello, Matt. Thank you for having me.”
“Yeah, thanks for stopping by. I’m not sure how much you heard of what I was saying, but yeah, what are you thinking about tonight?”
“Plato, and the true, how the sensible is the receding edge of the transcendent good. If that, if we could put it like that?”
“Yes. Yes. I like that!”
“Thank you. Yes. And that sensibility wouldn’t make sense without the intelligibility—well, I guess the super-intelligibility of goodness, right?”
“Right. Do you read a lot of Plato or what has been your relationship to the dialogues?”
“Well, I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself the an inheritor of any traditional understanding, but I edited this Wikipedia article on beauty, truth, goodness, which required doing a lot of research on Platonism. I’m not coming at it like a dissecting scholar necessarily, or even someone in love with Plato. I like Plato. You know, Gandhi read Plato.”
“I didn’t know that actually. Really?”
“Yes, yes, yes. He read Socrates is in the tradition of a non-violence, of truth-force.”
“That’s excellent. So glad to know that.”
“So that’s what where I’m coming from: a kind of more Eastern blend and synthesis of Eastern and Western approaches. I read a lot of Ken Wilber. I did a lot of spiritual practice and I achieved a lot of altered states of noetic conscious, higher consciousness, so to speak. And then went all the way into that realm, like a psychonaut, to explore a higher layer beyond the mimetic layer. And so now I am trying to come back down, to translate ideas from this higher realm. But I feel like there’s a realm beyond the forms. And so what I’m trying to do is to bring down ideas by bringing up ideas, to bring back ideas so that there’s a perceptual up and down, like between higher and lower.”
“Well, I can relate to the desire to go East for these sorts of insights. I started there, too, and I only came back to Western philosophy in my mid-twenties after spending like 18 to 25 as a Buddhist, going as deeply into non-dualism as I could manage without a personal teacher. I rejected Western philosophy and religion almost totally. I’ve since come back to it and just rediscovered that there is an esotericism and mysticism in the West, as well. Plato was already steeped in Vedic wisdom and Egyptian wisdom. It’s like, he was already distilling a planetary wisdom, inspired by African and Asian traditions. He didn’t just make up this stuff himself. He’s just translating it into Greek, on some level.”
[At this point Brett’s signal dropped]
In the beginning of the Timaeus, Plato’s cosmogonic dialogue, he discusses the myth of Atlantis and the history before Athens going back to the Egyptians. There’s already this sense of deep history and all the wisdom that’s been forgotten and is barely able to be recalled by Plato’s dialogue characters. Now here we are, almost 2,500 years later, relating to Plato as he was relating to the wise ones before him. This is the nature of the transmission of some kind of original revelation that we no longer directly perceive.
Anamnesis or recollection is the core of the Platonic method: it’s going into the soul and remembering our origin in eternity. Yeah, it’s a turning away from the world, but that’s only the first part of the journey. You have to turn back. And the thing is when you do turn back—and as Brett was saying—bring up ideas and bring down ideas, it can be dangerous, right?! The Athenians put Socrates on trial for bringing up ideas all the time and asking people, “What do you mean by that?” They accused him of corrupting the youth and atheism, not believing in the gods of the state. And they killed him. I mean, they did give him an out. They said you could just skip town. But Socrates was like, no, I’m going go ahead and drink that hemlock, almost as his final lesson, really, as if to say, “Why are you all afraid of death?” You know, it’s finally the opportunity to fully turn in some sense.
For Plato, the relation between the Good and the visible sun may seem like only a metaphor. But it’s not only a metaphor. The visible sun is the Good, but only when we see it as the Good. If we see it as a ball of gas that’s just sort of randomly congealed as a result of an accidental quantum flux at the beginning of time, just a function of thermodynamics, a reduction of the whole thing to randomness without intelligibility, without a meaning, then the sun is not the Good. The sun is just a shadow. But there’s so much evidence in the sensory world of intelligibility, of Logos. There’s so much evidence of it. I think more people are waking up to this. We’ve had 150 years or whatever of materialism spreading. But it would seem we’ve reached the null point and people are finding it incredible, in the sense of unbelievable. It’s just not possible to think that the world is random from top to bottom. I mean, yes, there’s chance, there’s contingency. But the idea that there is no deeper texture and flow and Way guiding the emergence of all of this beauty? Of course, there’s also pain and suffering and tragedy. But look at the overall curvature of the grain. I believe it is becoming increasingly more difficult to miss, even in the midst of a world that geopolitically is sliding toward war, even amidst all of the injustice and inequality and the lies that pollute our social situation: there’s still an arc. What we know scientifically is the most evidence you could ask for of a kind of divine order. And it’s an evolutionary order. It’s not some kind of eternally fixed order.
Whitehead points out about Plato’s Timaeus that it’s way closer to a kind of evolutionary cosmology than Newton’s Scholium, which imagines fixed laws of nature imposed from God’s perch in heaven as the engineer mathematician. Plato is way closer to the contemporary of idea of a self-organizing, hierarchically structured natural world that has these levels of complexity that emerge over time. It’s just that for Plato, time is a moving image of eternity. And so, there’s a grain in the wood of the world. Matter itself is meaningful, is made of signs, and we can read them. So that’s my Platonism. Thanks to Adam Robbert for inspiring me to a just wax on Plato for a little bit. I hope you all enjoyed it.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?