Print This Post
Plato and Narrativity Over Strict Definition
Published by Cynthia R. Nielsen June 11th, 2006 in Ancient Philosophy, PlatoIn preparing for my lecture this week on Plato (for an introduction to philosophy course), I was reviewing the famous allegory of the cave from the seventh chapter of the Republic, and was struck by Plato’s emphasis on the explanatory power of narrativity over strict definition. Though there are numerous aspects upon which one could focus in regard to the allegory of the cave, two themes that seem to jump to the surface are Plato’s view of the structure of reality, as well as his take on what true education is.
The allegory is of course quite familiar—the prisoners are chained to their chairs in a subterranean cave such that they can only look straight ahead at the wall directly in front of them. Behind the chained prisoners, we have a fire and between the fire and the bound individuals there is a path along which we find a low wall. Other people are walking down this path, carrying various objects and small statues that can be seen over the top of the wall. What the prisoners see in actually are the shadows of these things projected on the back wall of the cave. Yet, given that this is all that they have ever been exposed to, they take the shadows to be reality. Then one day a prisoner is freed and eventually experiences the real world outside the cave. At first the light hurts his eyes, not being accustomed to its brightness, and he is blinded . Little by little he adjust to the light, first seeing the shadows (outside), then the images of things reflected in water, and eventually the things themselves. Finally, he is able to look at the sun itself. After his experience, he realizes that the shadowy world in which he had lived was unreal, and goes back to the cave to tell the other prisoners of his findings. However, the still bound prisoners do not share his enthusiasm and mock him and eventually want to kill him.
Given Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology, we understand the cave as the world perceived by the senses and its shadows as the things of the world of the senses. The world outside the cave is the true world, the world perceived by the mind, which is also the world of Ideas/Forms. The objects outside the cave symbolize the Ideas/Forms. Lastly, the sun symbolizes the Form of the Good.
Of course as Christians, we would want to reject Plato’s dualism, his negative view of the sense world as quasi-reality, etc.; however, Plato’s view of what true learning or education is and entails, viz., a “conversion” that brings with it a desire for that which is good, true, and beautiful is highly attractive. Education is not mere “information exchange,” as is unfortunately so prevalently taught and modeled today in our universities (and even in seminaries). Rather, true learning involves a passage from darkness to light that changes the whole person. In presenting these truths in the form of narrative, Plato seems to suggest that certain philosophical themes (such as the nature of learning) are best expressed by story or drama and cannot be scientifically or mathematically defined. Plato, who is often labeled a “rationalist,” is certainly not a rationalist of the modernist variety, as he values narrativity, mythic accounts and in so doing allows for mystery.
Reading this caused me to wonder about two things:
1) Since one of the Christian community’s tasks is to “make disciples”, how does this view of what education is shape our disciple-making strategies?
2) To what extent does such thinking influence N.T. writers, as might be suggested by statements such as: “The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves” (Hebrews 11:1)?
Bill,
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by (1), but I can say that in my own vocational calling of teaching, it has huge implications as to my approach in teaching.
Regarding (2), I’ll have to allow someone more up on NT studies to address that question.
Cheers,
Cynthia
Chesterton, in the first chapter of his book “Chaucer,” writes:
“There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude. The light of the positive is the business of the poets, because they see all things in the light of it more than do other men.”
In these few lines concerning Chaucer, Chesterton gives us a glimpse of St. Thomas Aquinas own “passage out of” (educare - to lead out of) darkness to light. For Thomas was above all the philosopher of creation, who showed by the distinction of existence from essence that the created world was indeed a free and wonderful gift.This Thomistic theme or understanding runs all the way through Chesterton’s writing. (Etienne Gilson praised Chesterton’s book on Aquinas as the greatest book on Thomas ever written.)
I would also add the the next great “passage out of” darkness to light is Aquinas’s exposition of the dual mode of divine communication of the “veritas prima” and, ultimately, in God’s twofold activity “ad extra,” as the one “Cause” of two distinct created “effects:” creation and salvation. This distinction between the natural and supernatural orders is a “real distinction.” It exists in reality before any consideration of the mind and is as important to Aquinas’s theology, as the “real distinction” between essence and existence is to his philosophy.
G.K. Chesterton also notes in a comment made to H. G. Wells: “that the fact of two things being different implies that they are similar. The hare and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree in the quality of motion. The swiftest hare cannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. When we say the hare moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves…” (Heretics, (New York, 1906) 82).
The fact that the natural and supernatural orders are distinct implies they are similar. They are two different orders of participation in the Divine Nature, but they are analogically similar. “Grace presupposes nature,” because it perfects nature. Grace elevates human nature “proportionately” so that man can “connaturally” participate in the Divine Nature according to a higher order of perfection. Thus according to Aquinas, those in a state of grace should be doublely grateful!!!
Dear Otets Gregory,
Your post is a good reminder that we keep our hearts attuned and filled with thankfullness for God’s many gifts.
You make an interesting point in regard to the distinct orders implying an analogical similarity.
Always good to hear from you,
Cynthia
By juxaposing Chaucer to Aquinas via GKC, I wanted to underline that “narration” and “strict definition” are like the orders of “grace” and “nature”; i.e., they are distinct, yet similar.
“Narration” is the transmission of a world vision at the level of behaviour or praxis of a community in a determinate historical and cultural context. It is not only the fruit of a common understanding, or a common political or moral praxis, or the fruit of a commonly perceived hierarchy of values; “narration” is the fruit(a word which implies gift)of a common work or effort to unite the epistemological with the existential order.
Cynthia,
While agreeing with you that Christianity like Platonism conforms one’s whole self to the truth, I wonder how much of a deal breaker it is that we are called to conform not to objects, forms or ideals but rather to a Person. In both we are conforming to something external….but precisely not some thing; someone who lives in us always only in the flesh. While we can love the Forms, the Forms do not first love us. With this point, it seems to me any relation to Platonism is only on the surface, something Augustine and Justin Martyr did not see.
Blessings,
Bret
Hi Bret,
My point was more to emphasize broadly speaking contrasting views of education–on the one hand, educating the whole person (which is in a sense analogous to “conversion” which of course addresses and involves the whole person) vs. on the other hand, mere “information” exchange which seems to me to address only the mind and is de-personalizing. I am certainly not suggesting that Christianity and Platonism has a deep harmonization or that we are called to love abstract entities rather than the Triune God. I tend to go with Michael Hanby’s take on e.g., Augustine, viz., that his similarities with Platonism are as you say for the most part “surface” and that Augustine’s Christology and doxology must be central and not peripheral when one studies Augustine’s “philosophy.”
Cheers,
Cynthia
Cynthia,
This is an interesting post and I agree that educatiuon in our society could learn a lot from the Palonic approach. More especially, we would benefit from the recognition that there is a real subsisting Truth that is more real that opinion and that is true in itself. I think one of the worst things to happen in Western culture was when we became risistant to learning due the implication that we do not, as we are, know enough. We cannot face the fact that our opinions are largely stupid or at least ignorant. Thus we hide from truth inside the cave afraid that the ones who return back from the surface might indeed be correct.
A second point I would make is that the Christian philosophers such as Augustine or Justin Martyr did not uncritically sucumb to Platonic thinking as some seem to indicate. They were very much aware of the differences betweeen Platonic thought and Christian doctrine and yet they saw that these thinkers (Plato, Plotinus, etc.) had really seen something true and good. Although it is no substitute for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who is both a Person and Truth or Goodness itself, it is a frame work that proivided a very fertile way to make sense of reality. I would make mention that it is not J. Martyr or Augustine, the admirers of Greek thought, who went astray, but rather the uncritical (undiscerning) people like Tertullian, who was once a good Christian but so rabidly anti-philosophical that he fell prey to much evil and ended his life as a heretic. It is no fault of Plato’s that He did not know that Truth is a Person, or if we want to be more accurate, is a Trinity of Persons which in iself is thus beyond personhood. Rather he took a brave and noble step forward and posited for us a subsisting Truth and Goodness. These are not, Plato taught us, simply ideas in our heads like the sophists claimned, but are true realities that are more real than you or me. It is only a matter of identifying all these Ideal Forms (Good, True, Beautiful, etc) into the One (which the Platonists of the Middle Academy and the Neoplatonists after them did in fact do) and then realizing that this One is the One God, a personal being. This of course the heathen Platonists did not do (although Plotinus came close) but Christian Platonists (Augustine and J. Martyr etc.) did do this and completed the circle. Platonism is completed not by Plato who left it open. The succeeding generations of Platonic thinkers, to include Christians, took the school of thought to its preordained (as Justin martyr might say) conclusion. As Martyr also says, God gave revalation (OT) to the Jews and philosophy to the Greeks. The two are both gifts from God, one in the order of Grace and the other in the order of Nature. Both Grace and Nature are from and by God. Mr Saunders is correct to say that God loves us in the flesh but we must not, in a burst of anti-enlightenment enthusiasm, allow ourselves to forget that God did make us corporeal ~rational~ beings and that our minds’ ability to think beyond the here and now and the material is not in vain but is a God given gift. The fact that Plato did not know that ultimate reality is personal or rather super-personal is not any kind of deal breaker and I rather think that we lose out when we uncritically accept certain assertions of postmodernity that are understandable but over reactive responses to modernist rationalism.
Hi David,
Thanks for your post. All we need is Mr. McIntosh’s, Mr. Cory’s and Fr. Basil’s participation, we will have a great UD discussion going. This is of course in addition to Otets Gregory’s most excellent comments, and of course not to exclude Bill who intiated the whole thing.
Cheers,
Cynthia
Dear Cynthia,
I applaud your appreciation of Plato’s account of learning as transforming a person. And your reservations about the “dualism” that you suspect is present in his discussion, are very understandable. For in the Phaedo (especially) Plato certainly does promotes a dualism that essentially rejects embodied life (the body as “chains”). But I think in the Republic, as well as in the Symposium, Timaeus, etc., he presents a very different view. The first indication of this in the Republic is the three-part model of the “soul” that he expounds in book iv, in which the “appetites” are accepted as a legitimate “part” of the soul itself. But the appetites that he discusses there are clearly bodily affairs, the sort of thing that he had dismissed without a hearing in the Phaedo. And he describes the “rational part’s” job as that of harmonizing these appetites with the spirited part and itself, into a functioning unity. And he goes on to suggest that the rational part will do this by seeking knowledge of what’s Good; which of course sets the agenda for books vi and vii, including the Cave allegory. Thus, the Cave allegory needn’t be understood as denying the importance of embodied life or physical reality. Rather, it directs our attention to whatever is true (Good, beautiful) in embodied life and physical reality. That doesn’t seem to be an objectionable dualism. It rejects nothing; it merely asserts that truth is not reducible to “body” as such. Which surely any theist will agree. Accordingly, in the Timaeus Plato describes the demiurge as creating the physical world because he is not “jealous.” That is, he doesn’t view the physical world as unworthy or something to be rejected; instead, he wants it to resemble himself as much as possible.
I think it’s important to confront the issue of Plato’s alleged “dualism” directly and in specific detail, because most of his modern critics–from David Hume through Bertrand Russell to Martha Nussbaum–assume that the Phaedo’s dualism (the body as “chains”) reveals to us Plato’s underlying view. But if that were the case, it would be difficult to understand how such life-affirming modern thinkers as Hegel, Emerson, and Shelley have been able to derive a major part of their inspiration from Plato. They’ve found that inspiration in the Republic, Symposium and Timaeus, and not in the dualistic parts of the Phaedo. And they’ve found it in Plotinus, whose primary inspiration is not (I believe) the Phaedo. A great advantage of Hegel’s account of transcendence as “_true_ infinity,” rather than the dualistic “spurious infinity,” is that it explains how one can be completely serious about transcendence without buying the dualistic account of it that Plato gives in the Phaedo. Understanding Hegel’s progress from Kantian spurious infinity to Hegelian true infinity makes it easier to see a similar progression in Plato.
The way of reading Plato that I’ve been sketching can be found spelled out in glorious detail (though without any reference to Hegel) in T.H. Irwin’s _Plato’s Ethics_ and his other works.
Best, Bob
You wrote: “Of course as Christians, we would want to reject Plato’s dualism, his negative view of the sense world as quasi-reality, etc.; however, Plato’s view of what true learning or education is and entails, viz., a “conversion” that brings with it a desire for that which is good, true, and beautiful is highly attractive.”