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It's difficult to say what Plato's conception of morality was. He wrote mostly dramatic or literary works, not theoretical textbooks. It is true that a philosopher, Socrates, plays the key role in the dialogues, and it may be tempting to think of Socrates as Plato's spokesperson. But that must be a temptation we should resist, just as we should resist the idea that there is a character in Shakespeare who is his spokesperson.
Last time we discussed Plato together I offered the tendentious view that he could be used as the basis for considering the very interesting approach to ethics called hedonism, the view, roughly (as I take it), that you should always see if you can't maximise your own pleasure.
(Some people take Hedonism to mean the doctrine that you should pursue pleasure without stipulating whether it is to be your pleasure or everybody's (or anybody's) pleasure that is to be maximised. Thus Mill is sometimes said to be a hedonist, simply because he understands happiness as a sort of pleasure - even though he thinks we should maximise the general sum of happiness, a completely different proposition from maximising our own.)
The fact is you can see hedonism in some of the the things Plato writes, but it is if anything Socrates whom he makes to look like a hedonist (at least part of the time - eg in the Meno.)
What I have to say now is that even if you can defend the idea that Socrates is a hedonist, Plato in other things that he writes says things, more apparently on his own behalf, that are directly dismissive of it.
What I want to do today is to focus on the non-hedonistic perspective you find, and find, as I say, predominating, in Plato's writings taken as a whole.
This is specially important historically, and actually today, because Plato was read and embraced by the early systematisers of the Christian religion, who built the ideas they took from him into the foundations of Christian theology.
The main point, especially clear in the earliest form of Christian theology, was that this world is the pits, or in a more recent vernacular, pants.
And the main question was how to get through it so you emerge on the other side well positioned to benefit from the world you pass into.
What both Plato and Christianity hold out for you is the prospect of something other than 'pleasure': and better than pleasure.
Two questions at least:What's wrong with pleasure? and What is this better thing?
Plato's estimation of pleasure is bound up with his conception of the human being as made up of different 'agencies', agencies that are often in conflict with each other.
You get this idea as late as the early twentieth century in the absurdly influential writings of Freud. He taught that there were three often conflicting agencies, id, ego and superego.
And the idea that our reason and our desire are different agencies which often pull in different directions is a commonplace even today.
Plato had several goes at this. We find one or two in the Republic. Here is one which I don't think helps us much.
First an analogy is drawn between the 'soul' and the city. In a city - according to Plato's Republic Socrates - there are three elements: rulers, soldiers, artisans.
In a successful city, the rulers will excel in wisdom, soldiers in courage and artisans in obedience ... And in a just city there will be harmony between the three classes, a harmony that results in each of the classes doing the thing they are most suited to: ruling, fighting, making.
It is the same in the 'soul'! There are three elements. And in a just soul there is harmony between the three elements, arising when each of the elements does what they are specially fit for.
It's not easy to be absolutely clear what the three elements of the soul are on this analogy. One account (Kenny reports this in Ancient Philosophy, p.264) is to say that they are 'temper', 'lower elements' and 'reason'. One clear thing is that reason's role in the soul is posited as parallel to the ruler's role in the city: it is fitted for authority and wise decision-taking. And another thing is clear: desires don't belong to reason. Desires therefore - in the just soul - are subservient to reason.
Another figure Plato offers (in the Phaedo) is the soul as two horses yoked
together in a chariot, and their driver the Charioteer. He wants to go to a
'heavenly banquet', but the two horses are trying to go in different directions
- one 'up' and one 'down'. The Charioteer
has to control these two inclinations so that the chariot actually moves 'onward
and upward' (GQT) but Plato never makes it clear what
the two horses represent in the soul.
Back in the Republic we find another passage which identifies the three parts of the soul quite clearly. They are reason, appetite (or desire) and temper. A person is thirsty but under doctor's orders not to drink. S/he has an appetite or desire which her or his reason is telling them to ignore. S/he may be angry that s/he keeps feeling hungry in spite of knowing s/he mustn't drink. The anger is temper at work (Republic 436a and following.)
Prompt: is the basic idea of more than one 'agency' to the human being plausible? If so, what agencies are there?
Might you be wrong? How would you check?
If you have the picture of desire and reason being different drivers in the person it is easy perhaps to slip into thinking that reason is the better part.
Prompt: Could you resist? Could you insist that the better thing in me is desire, that reason should give way to them?
Is it perhaps true by definition that reason should be backed against desire? When you yield to desire you get at least short term pleasure.
So one idea is that satisfying desire yields pleasure, but there is some component that should be heeded more than desire and that is reason. That seems to be one source of the conclusion that there is something more important than pleasure - ie more important than pleasure is whatever you get from exercising your reason.
Plato has another idea tending to the same conclusion. Pleasure is associated most clearly with the senses, and the senses, Plato makes clear, are in his opinion next to worthless. So it's a small step to the conclusion that the pleasures they yield must be low-grade too.
This comes across vividly in another of Plato's vastly influential images: the image of the Prisoners in the Cave, which you considered last year. (Plato, Republic, Book vii 514-18)
From (my) 1st Year presentation:
We are to think of a cave in which a number of people - men of course in Plato's scenario - have been imprisoned since birth. So they have never seen the world as it is outside. Actually the cave is an open one. there is a wide entrance from which the path into the cave slopes down until you reach the wall at the back of the cave. The prisoners therefore would be able to see something of the world outside if only they could look up and back through the open entrance.
But they can't. They are chained up, and in such a carefully contrived way that they have to face the rear of the cave, and in such a way that they can't even turn their heads to steal even a glance at the exit behind them.
Then we are to imagine that behind the prisoners is a fire. And between the fire and the chained prisoners runs a wall with a path running along by it. People are walking along the path. If the wall hadn't been there the fire would throw their shadows onto the back wall of the cave, but the wall obscures their bodies. However they are carrying things, and these things poke up above the wall. So shadows of these things do appear on the back wall of the cave. The things carried include images and models of all sorts of things - including models of human beings and of animals in various materials.
Human experience for most of us most of the time is like the experience of the prisoners in their fettered state. All they can see are the shadows. They can't see each other, they can't see anything else for real - only those shadows on the wall. And the things producing the shadows are not real animals and plants and other human beings either - but images and models or mock-ups of real people, real animals.
Then Socrates wants us to imagine the situation of a prisoner who somehow breaks free. They can turn round; and they can make their way towards the light.
The brilliance of the light makes it painful to do so however and we will have to think of the freed prisoner being dragged along almost against their will. But when they get used to the light they see the truly limited state of their former existence when they took shadows of models for reality, and they are able to rejoice in the state of 'enlightenment' they have now achieved, in which they see what is truly real - the sun - the thing that is actually responsible for all the appearances they formerly took for real.
Enlightenment costs - involves intense struggle - but a person who has achieved it is not likely to want to go back, Plato imagines. And should they ever try to go back - perhaps to release the other prisoners and urge them to seek enlightenment themselves, they would be likely to meet with incredulity and even ridicule. Self-diagnosis of ignorance is difficult.
The cave story can be seen to make the point that the realm of the senses is rubbish. It is our ordinary senses that are in play in the cave, and they give us a completely misleading picture of reality. It is not a big step to conclude that the pleasures they yield must be of low grade too.
At any rate that is what Plato thinks.
He didn't rate very highly the pleasures yielded by the senses. And they include of course what we would I suspect regard as the ordinary pleasures of life - pleasures which often are aspects of various sorts of sense experience (good sex, eating and drinking well, doing sport). He thought there was more to be had from life than pleasures of this kind.
The 'more' comes not from the senses but from the exercise of 'reason' and the 'understanding' or 'wisdom' that such exercise yields.
What is 'understanding? These days we might suggest that it has to do with the possession of 'concepts' or 'categories', and that understanding as distinct from sense experience is something humans can do, and maybe higher animals, but not simpler creatures - the planarian worm for example.
It has been very popular to link this with the ability to talk: you need language to have understanding, it has been said. (Aquinas thought this.)
In summary: One claim then in Plato is that 'understanding' is different from having 'sense experience'. But then he adds another: somehow acquiring understanding is more worthwhile than having sense experience.
What is the reward associated with understanding?
In the Republic it is pretty clear that the reward of 'understanding' was not a species of pleasure. It was something more worthwhile than pleasure, and for this reason the strand of Plato we are talking about is not hedonistic.
But what is it? What is the infinitely worthwhile non-pleasure that understanding yields - or is?
We have Plato's story: It is the enlightenment we achieve when we have struggled out of the cave and see, illuminated by the intellectual sun, things as they really are.
Prompt: What do you think? Do you know what he is talking about?
A 6th Century picture of St Augustine. Thanks to the Falvey Memorial Library, Villanova University |
There is a sting in the tail of this encounter with the fanciful ideas of a long-past civilisation, and a savage one. Plato's ideas were taken up in medieval times by Augustine (and later by Aquinas) who both tried to develop the idea that there was just the one theory of the universe that came through with authority from ancient times, and that was the theory taught by Plato and Aristotle on the one hand and St Paul on the other.
They considered, in other words, that both these traditions were getting at the same basic truth - conceding that where they appeared to differ, a little plastic surgery might be necessary.
Here is one bit of smoothing: under the scalpel of the Church Fathers, Plato's superior world outside the cave became heaven, the brilliant light at the heart of it became God and the ultimate reward which went beyond pleasure the eternal contemplation of the Divine.
So the fateful career of medieval Christianity was launched, with its Platonic finger pointing unequivocally upwards. This life was a sort of immigration hall, vetting people for entry to the one and only desirable destination, heaven, where true happiness was to be found in, yes, 'understanding' - a sort of intellectual basking in the presence of God.
I don't like to mention the statistics, but maybe you should know: the vast, vast majority of applications were known to be turned down. Only a tiny elite gained entry: and the rest, simply, suffered the most unbearable torture for eternity.
Contemplation |
And when the reasonable people said: but surely that's a bit over the top? - surely not even God can make people suffer unrelentingly for ever - Augustine - that's St Augustine - devoted careful philosophical pages to explaining how with ingenuity and determination eternal and unbearable torment for the illegals as it were could au contraire certainly be engineered. And had been. (Augustine, City of God, XXI 3-7.)
An unusual mind at work you might think. One that was decisive in building the intellectual framework within which we lived for a thousand years and which colours what we think and do to this day (for example our thinking about euthanasia, abortion, contraception, genetic engineering, nature).
Any pain that kills a person "is caused by the circumstance that the soul is so connected with the body that it succumbs to great pain and withdraws; for the structure of our members and vital parts is so infirm that it cannot bear up against that violence which causes great or extreme agony. But in the life to come this connection of soul and body is of such a kind, that as it is dissolved by no lapse of time, so neither is it burst asunder by any pain. And so, although it be true that in this world there is no flesh which can suffer pain and yet cannot die, yet in the world to come there shall be flesh such as now there is not, as there will also be death such as now there is not. For death will not be abolished, but will be eternal, since the soul will neither be able to enjoy God and live, nor to die and escape the pains of the body." Augustine, City of God, XXI, 3. |
The question was still: how can I achieve happiness? And the Fathers' answer:
(1) in this life you follow God's commandments and you accept the help of the Church. You will then be able to enjoy true happiness - nothing to do with earthly pleasures - which is eternal communion with God.
(2) Bear in mind that one way of missing out on happiness is certainly to suffer the perpetual torments of hell - so if you don't understand the 'communion' bit you should live a good Christian life even so.
| Revised 13:02:09 | Prepared by VP Foundations of Ethics Home page A module of the BA Philosophy programme Centre for Professional Ethics | University of Central Lancashire |
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