ELEPHANT TO PLATT
Forgive me, but as this is the first time I've been pleased to get this sort
of serious question, my answer has gone a bit overboard.
PLATT WROTE:
> Incidentally, Elephant, another question. Are Truth, Goodness and
> Beauty all on the same high level of "absolute essences" in
> Plato's philosophy? Somehow I have the idea that Beauty is at the
> top, taking precedence over the other two. But, like Roger says, I
> could be wrong. Thanks in advance for your answer.
ELEPHANT:
Truth is an interesting topic which I don't think we will ever get very far
from, but I find I've really got stuck into the beauty question, so the
detail of what I have to say about truth may have to wait. But in short,
truths are statements about beings, truths are not beings themselves.
Platonic truth cannot be a Platonic form, because it is the means by which
they are identified. For Plato, what pragmatism discusses as truth, eg
whether it is true that the rabit goes around the hunter or the hunter
around the rabit, is to be characterised as Opinion. Plato is not
uninterested in correctness in Opinion - after all that is what his theory
of art is about: how to go about identifying and acting upon good Opinions,
the illuminating role of the form of thr Good. But he does think that there
is something else besides opinion that we can call 'truth', which I have
talked about as the truth in virtue of which pragmatism is true, which is
eternal, and so, from his point of veiw, more worth talking about than
opinion. But this truth isn't a form. It is an essence, in the sense that
you can define it's characteristics (the marks of truth), but I don't agree
that Plato's theory of forms is simply a theory of essences. That's one way
it has been read, and its a rather superficial reading, IMHO. A lot of the
problems people have with making sense of Plato come from this mistake of
thinking that any definition of a thing's essential characteristics must
constitute a Platonic form. That way we get forms for every general term
under the sun, and an attempt to explain the resemblances of men by a form
of "man", for example. That way leads to the third man argument infinte
regress: if men resemble each other in virtue of resembling the form "man",
what do men and "man" resemble each other in virtue of? A second form
"man2"? And then a third.... so no resemblance is finally explained, and no
essence finally uncovered. If you think that forms are essences, you are
likely to think that the theory of forms is a contradictory and incoherent
affair. But IMHO Plato really isn't aiming to explain resemblances and get
at essences, but to get at being, and that's quite a different objective.
So I say that there is an essence to truth, but not a form of truth, because
truth isn't a being but a condition of statements about being. In the next
post, if you are interested, I might try to tell you what that essence of
Platonic truth is. Coherrence plays a big part, but you have to understand
alot about Plato's beings to see why the standard objections to any
coherrence theory of truth don't apply here.
The place of Beauty in this scheme is an interesting one. But no, Beauty
does not take precedence over either Goodness or Truth. The Good is the
Sun, the light by which we apprehend all. Both truth and beauty are lower
level concepts. Indeed, I would argue that they are not fully Forms at all,
in the sense that there is a Form of the Good.
Beauty is discussed in Plato in 2 different contexts which suggest 2
different concepts.
Firstly, beauty is discussed as the outward shape of Harmony, and Harmony is
something like Plato's conception of Justice: all the parts working together
in the service of the whole. There is a huge amount to say about Plato's
conception of justice in the soul and the state, and it is via that complex
picture of the three levels of the soul (appetite [biology], honour
[social], reason [intellect]) that one can come to an understanding of
proper harmony, which is a situation where reason rules, but with a proper
understanding of the roles and charaterisics of the lower parts of the
psyche. Arguably, this conception of Beauty is something like the beauty of
a sceintific theory: a perfect economy where all elements of the situation
are properly taken into account. For Plato's tripartite conception of the
soul is, like any good scientific theory, symultaneously a theory and a set
of instructions for practice. Now such beauty is not a form as such,
because it is merely the way a perfectly good individual/state/scientific
theory should appear in virtue of it's goodness. Good is the form, and a
harmony directed at the Good will be beautiful. Any beauty which strikes us
as such a harmony of elements is regarded by Plato as an image of the Good -
but it is important to remember that such an image is an image, not the
thing itself, nor some competing "absolute essence". Pedagocically, that
beauty can be useful because it turns our thoughts to the harmony, and thus
the good, that it is an image of. This is the conception of beauty
according to which God's beauty, if you like, shines forth equally and the
same from both the snubnosed visage of Socrates and the features of, say,
Helen Blaxendale.
Secondly, Beauty is talked about in a more earthly way in terms of Beautiful
boys - and, if you accept my hetrosexual report of the matter, only very
occasionally in terms of beautiful women.
This sparks a lengthy digression, and a digression from the digression.
Generally this second kind of beauty is contrasted with the former kind of
beauty and placed alongside it for that purpose, sometimes quite literally.
Socrates, while pig-ugly, is supposed to have a shiningly beautiful soul in
the harmony sense, and the beautiful boys court him (it is supposed to be
that way around - Socrates having his virtuous soul constantly tested - to
defeat it being some supremely honourable triumph for the succesful boy).
There are books written on the Athenian attitude to homosexual love, and it
is a mute point how much it has to do with biological as opposed to social
values. Certainly it formed something of an institution in that ancient
city, and there was a specific shape which such affairs were supposed to
take by tradition. In direct opposition to current social values, what we
might call paedophilia was more highly regarded, socially, than same age
relationships. There was supposed to be honour on both sides in a man-boy
relation that could not exist in a man-man relationship. The greeks were
obsessed by bodily beauty attached to youth - in terms of artistic
representations they perhaps invented the modern socially approved concept
of it. So the young beautiful boy was held to be paying a great
compliment, bestowing great honour, the greatesr, on the elder man, by his
attentions. In the other direction, the elder man was supposed to be an
honourable prize for the boy, in terms of social position, or perhaps inner
beauty, but more generally in terms of whatever status and experience that
man had to offer. To make a play for a dustbin man would not be highly
thought of, and, in virtue of that, not very likely to happen. A
relationship between an elder man and a young boy would be regarded as
serving a similar social function to the finishing schools which young
ladies of a certain class were once sent before being launched upon the
London scene - strange as this may seem to modern morals. Socrates wasn't
corrupting the Youth by having sexual relations with them, but by precisely
by preaching abstainance and intellectualism. The Sophists whom Phaedrus so
much admires were as much a part of the man-boy tradition as Socrates was.
Sophists were paid to educate the youth of the upper class in rhetoric etc,
but would also have acquired followers who intended an exchange of a more
personal kind, an 'honourable association', which is probably a good name
for the way the whole institution was treated. Now, it seems to me that the
beauty which is discussed by Plato in this context is a form of social
value. Above all else, it is Honour which is at stake in such
relationships, not a romantic conception of Love. We should regard the
beauty which is honoured in such relationships as a pattern of the Social
level, which has broken quite free of Biological patterns, not least shown
in that the beautiful objects are boys and not women.
There is a great deal of sexual freedom expressed in Greek art of the
Hetrosexual kind - but interestingly beauty is not spoken of so much in this
context. Beauty is here treated as a question of honour, and, since women
occupied a low position in greek society (even staying indoors and out of
the public arena, the way they have to in some islamic soceities nowadays),
it seems to follow that women were discussed much less in terms of beauty,
though being just as attractive biologically.
Plato, I think, is not guilty of attachment to the Social patterns of value
which set this context for his discussion of the second kind of beauty. In
the Republic, Women are permitted to attain social positions on merit.
Moreover, the cheif institution by which they are sent and kept indoors,
i.e. marriage, is to be abolished and replaced by a peculiar institution
which Plato calls 'being held in common', and which, from the details (down
to the manner of dances and militarily scheduled debauchery), is intended to
prevent, for the spiritual health of the citezenry of both sexes, any
development of feelings of ownership - or indeed attachment. Children must
not, on any account, be brought up by their biological family. There is a
notable similarity between the tendancy in sexual politics that Plato
appears to be recommending for the republic and what in fact took place in
England during the second world war.
And it should not be forgotten that Plato's Republic takes the form it does
because of the greed displayed by one of Socrates' interlocutors, which
Socrates argues must lead to our inevitably requiring wars of competitive
imperialism with neirbouring states, where military imperatives triumph over
all others, including those which determine the position of women in pre-war
soceities. In this respect Plato's analysis resembles that of Lenin, for
whom all war was the consequence of imperialist greed, and for whom soceity
and individuals must be organised to cope with and triumph in this state of
war (military/state socialism), until global peace (which is really the
kingdom of god upon earth!) is somehow reached, at which point (in theory)
the apparatus of the state should be dissolved (which is the utopian
situation to which 'communism', strictly speaking, refers). On close
inspection of the text, one can see that the original greed is not something
that Plato approves of - indeed the entire apparatus that develops from that
point onward is intended as a mechanism for controlling it. One senses that
for Plato, it would be better if we never fell from grace into the situation
of greed which required the militarisation of soceity. But having fallen,
the Republic describes the valley of death through which we end up walking:
it is quite a prophetic book in that way: as much a prophetic distopia as
Orwell's 1984. It is, therefore, wrong to describe the republic as Plato's
'ideal soceity', for it appears that for plato no soceity could ever be
ideal, humans having the greed they have. In the end, Plato does not seem
to beleive that his recommendations for improvement could actually work on
the social level - he places more faith in the salvation of individuals, for
which his description of soceity has all along been mainly a metaphor (this
is where Plato and Lenin part company in a big way - Plato towards his heirs
in the Orthodox Christianity of Russia, if you like, and Lenin towards the
Evil Empire). For Plato, the ideal city is something that actually exists
"only in heaven", and in the hearts of men who belong there.
The men who belong there: I guess they would eat, which I have to do now.
ttfn
The Elephant Man
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