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Change is an aberration: all change will be halted, reversed, and timelessnessrestored. The fact that there is a world, or many worlds, is a result of a fall.

There may appear to be many entities, but ultimately there can only be one being,Being itself. This process of division and dissolution might go into reverse. Theseemanations might be re-absorbed until the multitude of things that exist would be

absorbed and dissolved. The world and persons might disappear. The world willdisappear altogether and so it will have been corrected. It will be as though it hadnever been.

2. Philosophy as Cosmic Ascent

The Cosmos has failed to hold together. At some time in the past there was a cosmiccatastrophe and what was once an entire and perfect world has suffered a collapse.The whole has produced a lesser version of itself, an emanation, a copy of theoriginal. Where there was one thing, now there is another, though the second thing isan aberration, a bad copy of the first. And if there can be a second entity, there can

be a third, fourth, and so a series of emanations without end, each of them a faintcopy of the preceding emanation, each more distant from the truth of the whole.

In the Timaeusthe cosmos was described as a totality in which the world and manand god together constituted a single divine being. Subsequent developmentsintroduced more complex layers and ladders of intermediaries, a great chain ofbeing.We require a complex of intermediaries to help us to ascend. We have fallenfrom pure reality, down into a terrible half-life, where nothing can be recognised forwhat it is and suffer from division as a result of materiality. Everything relates towhat it once was and the most we can look forward to is that it becomes again whatit once was. Languishing near the bottom of this chain of worlds of diminishingreality, descending eons, we suffer a reality deficit.

The upper realm has all reality, action and unity; the lower reality has only the reality,action and unity which the upper realm lends it. All that belongs to the intellect risesto this upper realm, while all materiality and formlessness sink down to form amorass without unity.

Mankind was once a timeless and immortal being, but we have become materialbeings, and this is a disaster. Our whole purpose now must be to recover bydisengaging ourselves from the immediate material circumstances in which we findourselves. Philosophy is a program of ascent. It takes the student fromcontemplating bodies, through contemplating souls, to contemplate the Mind andwhat is beyond.

For the Greeks everything relates to its origin. Plato and Socrates believe that wecome to know things byrecapturing them from the past. All knowing is an act ofrecovery. The souls in bodies all originally come from a single transcendent Soul andnever fully lose their identity with it. The mind has to retrace its path back out of thisfog that is made up of all the material and broken pieces of reality. The questioningmind can carve through the blizzard of appearances and sense impressions, to feelits way towards the original unity behind them


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Knowing about the cosmos, and its underlying harmony, helps us to recover our ownlost harmony. Though individuals may not yet realise it, their true interests are inharmony with their society and nation, and these are in harmony with the cosmos.We should not think that each of us has to struggle against our city or against nature.Should we leave behind political ambitions and take up intellectual and moral ones?Or can we pursue intellectual ambitions as though we were without any political

ambitions?

Socrates thinks there is a parallel or even identity between the political ascent (intopublic acclaim) and the cosmological ascent (of the individual, away from the worldof public recognition). Cosmological ascent has to be individual, and involves youleaving behind any desire to promote your own reputation. Those around you getusually upset when you show signs of trying to escape the competition for acclaim.They regard it as form of betrayal. If you are attempting to purify yourself, all yourcontemporaries understand that you have identified them as part of the corruptionthat you want to escape. The philosopher is sometimes regarded as an eccentric,and occasionally as a dangerous political dissident.

Socrates believes that there is no gap between acting truthfully and actingeffectively. Socrates thinks that thinking helps doing, for thinking helps us to actmore truthfully and effectively. Thinking is the action that helps all other forms ofaction. There is no gap between what is true and what works, no gap between theoryand practice. Truth is always up-building. Lying is always counter-productive so itmakes no sense. It harms the liar by delaying his engagement with truth.

Love and WisdomMan is driven by curiosity. He has wants, and he doesn't yet have what he wants.That he wants it means he knows that he doesn't have it. He is mad with love for it.Being in love is being a little out of your mind. Love is a god, and being in love ispossessed by this god. All desires and forms of attraction, are forms of love.

Man is a searcher and enquirer. We are all of us engaged in finding a better way todo things, and thus drawn towards excellence and the joy that accompanies it. If thesearch becomes serious we will no longer be interested in the ordinary and everydaythings. This lover of wisdom, we may call the philosopher (philo= love, sophia=wisdom). The philosopher is a seeker and searcher, and sometimes perhaps also hefinds what he is looking for.

Man is a curiosity-driven being, an enquirer, scientist and philosopher. He is drivenby love and desire. Love leads him upwards from the material things that make upthe appearances to the moral and intellectual things that are the truth behind allappearances. The philosopher is driven by the desire to know. He is an investigator

because is dissatisfied by the usual explanations and looks beyond the immediateappearances. His investigations mean that he has to ask questions about theconsensus view and he may withdraw from public life.

Each person is a microcosm of society as a whole. Each person is a microcosm ofthe cosmos. Society as a whole is a microcosm of the cosmos. But the cosmos hasbecome fragmented so all that we are able to see are disconnected pieces. Weourselves are pieces that have to be pieced together. So we can learn about the


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whole, the cosmos, by examining its parts, and feeling out way towards a coherent,contradiction-free account of their connections.

Philosophy is all about talking that will examine each of beliefs and test it forcoherence with all the rest, and we can find out which our own assumptions toabandon, and so we move increasingly away from the cloud of unexamined

assumptions, into greater truth. By examining fragments and looking for a good fitbetween them, we may discover how the original unity and logic of the cosmos Thisis the talking cure, a therapy in which we are able to identify falsehood and so to berid of it.

Desire and KnowledgeSocratesOur final virtue is the desire to know. Man is This is something much greater thaninquisitiveness, curiosity it is the drive to science. The fullest and highest definitionof man is the man who searches and wants to know.

The greatest personification of this man the Greeks offer us is Socrates. Socrates is

the personification of enquiry. He is relentlessly curious. He says he is the gentleinnocent, though he is able to play more innocent than he is, in order to get hisinterlocutors to blurt out the pieces of evidence he needs. He takes their remarksmore seriously than they do themselves. Socrates takes the views of ordinarypeople seriously, finding the range of opinions and the consensus of commonsense as the starting place for our enquiry.

Man is in love. He is driven and consumed by desire. Love is a disease, likecuriosity, so here we see that knowledge is a kind of love or passion, and thateverything can be given up for it. The word Plato uses for this desire is love. Wehave to attach ourselves to those in whom we see nobility and becomeapprenticed to them. The senior man will induce the junior into the art of being a

man. In the Symposiumwe learn that a boy is apprenticed to a senior: he willaccompany him and learn from him how to be a man. Man and boy are held togetherby love and loyalty, and the boy learns as a result of this relationship. But if the manloves the boy, isnt an unhealthy dependency created? Socrates is not trapped by hislove into any such dependency. Because he is able to resist the passion of love,Socrates is the model for all the thinkers and teachers that follow him in the pursuitof manliness or virtue. Socrates show that the philosopher is the man who risesabove all passions and forces and is not pushed around by them.

Socrates insists that knowledge is a form of love. So we see that to be most humanis to be driven by curiosity, and so to be a little out of control. Socrates is in perfectcontrol of all of his passions, except love. He is driven only by curiosity to go on

asking questions, which reveal that we do not know what we think we know. He feelsnone of the pressures of this world, feels no pain, tiredness, but continuously turnsfrom the first appearances, inwards upwards to the second and third, so from bodilythings, to their first original pure shape. Curiosity is a form of desire and desire is aform of love. Love drives science.

Socrates has the power to take pressure without being overcome by it. He is unfazedunder enemy fire, does not feel tiredness, is not made drunk by wine, does not feelthe sexual advances of Greeks most desirable man. He seems impervious to all the


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passions and pressures that knock other people off their path. Socrates cannot beforced to resort either to violence or flight himself. His control over his own body andfeelings is absolute: this is a deeper form of manliness. To be a man is then to beimmune to the struggle. Our highest calling is to make ourselves imperturbablyserene, by the power of thought to raise ourselves above the everyday shocks of thisworld, that we no longer notice them. Impassivity is the greatest virtue.

The disciple and lover of wisdom is an investigator. He yearns for the fullness andreality of the things of which he presently only has the pieces. Socrates believes thatthe truth is latent in the mind of every human being due to his innate reason but hasto be given birth by questions asked by the teacher and answers given by thestudent. By asking questions Socrates simply draws out what is there within each ofthose he speaks to. He claims that he himself is barren, but like the proverbialmidwife (maieutikos) this enables him to assist at the birth of ideas in others. Byeliciting the views of his listeners and students, he enables until they see that someviews are not compatible with others. Then by his questions he helps them searchfor principles by which to decide which views to discard. This is the dialectic theconversation means of ruling out options until truth is revealed.

Questioning (elenchus) or arguing (eristics) are forms of the wrestling that is intrinsicto public life. We proceed by probing and questioning. So we can move from thesmaller case, of any particular craft to the larger case of making and running afunctioning society. And we move from the larger case of running a society to thesmaller case of the proper behaviour for an individual. Indeed the whole cosmos isalso a city, and may be considered on the analogy of a city, or of a single organism.All our talk is analogical.

3. Plato on the CosmosPlato described a hierarchy of being. At the top of which were the Forms or Ideas,and at the bottom, the miasma of this life. The one cosmos has divided into separaterealms of many layers in a chain of being. In the Timaeushe described oneindissoluble one cosmos, a totality in which the world and man and god togetherconstituted a single divine being. Down here we suffer from a reality deficit. Platogives a number of versions of this cosmology. Plato indicates that the soul canescape bodiliness by a process of purification. He offers us plausible accounts innarrative form, as stories.

It is as though we have fallen into a deep crevasse: we live in the shadows andreceive only very poor refractions of a reality far above us. By a process of paideiasome few of us can return to that reality, learn it and come back to educate the restof us in it. There is not sufficient reality or truth this far down the cosmos. We are allshort of constantly light-headed. We follow our leader, but we also abandon oneleader to follow another, and so we move around in herds or swarms, restlessly onthe move, searching, but changing direction before we find anything.

All parts of Platos universe seek the good and are drawn together by love, sowhatever is higher is in charge, so the head in control of the body. We are all calledupwards. The upper world exerts a force of attraction. Love exerts a pull, which weare powerless against. Love exerts itself, but does not ultimately allow us any
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_beinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_beinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth


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freedom. The head has more goodness and reality about it than the body, but thehead supplies the body with the goodness and control that it is capable of.

At the top of the cosmos are the ideas. Ideas are the forms or matrices which placetheir stamp on material to make each specific thing. The Greeks regard material asnot ideal for this purpose, for materiality does not succeed in preserving the shape

the ideas give to it. Materiality is not the best substance to reflect perfection. In theTimaeusthe Demiurge, observing the perfect form, crafted in the material that was tohand, a copy that was as good as that material would allow.

At the top of the cosmos the heavenly bodies ceaseless process in a perfect motion.Everything below them shares in some degree in their motion, but the further fromthem we are, the more the perfection of that motion is forgotten, and the moredisrupted, staccato it becomes. At the bottom of the cosmos all motion is chaotic.Everything is fragmented, and this manic motion reaches a storm, and a rage. Themiasma and the unreliability of this world means that it cannot be properly known.This chaotic motion brings into being matter. Matter is motion at its most chaotic. Thebottom of the world is a mire of material that has to form, no beauty and no

continuity. Everything comes into being and passes away again, failing to hold anysingle form. The world we know is a junkyard in which everything is so chaoticallypiled up on everything else that it is near impossible to say what anything once was.Only if one of us ascends to where everything has come from and sees there theproper use and form of everything, will they be able to make out what things here aresupposed to be. What only very faintly and imperfectly picks up this motion does nothave any very lasting reality. It is all we know, but its imperfect motion will continueto contort it and change it so it. Because of it is imperfect, all this motion becomesmaterial. What is material is not really real.

The World-Soul sends the whole universe on its revolutions. Out of the shattered,chaotic and irrational movements we experience here, we have to have to be trained

to recover the perfect motion of the heavenly bodies overhead, as they follow theperfect motion of the cosmos above them. By listening to the movements of theuniverse and tuning out all the distracting noise of this lower realm we can get backinto step with the universe. This will take not one but many, many lifetimes, but if weconcentrate here, in the next life we may be a step further forward, one step higheron the cosmic ladder. We may appear to stay here, but when life in this presentworld (eon) is over we will be promoted to the one above, in which we will than makea circuit. We can be advanced or relegated, move upwards or downwards. Over ourheads are more eons. They represent the lessons which we have to learn, and theyrepresent the rulers who are our teachers and disciplinarians. The rulers are pastrulers, and the further back in the past the higher they are, and the higher they arethe deeper their roots in the past, and the closer to the origin of all things and so also

the more truthful they are. We have as it were fallen out of the past. Getting back tothat past, or to that timeless state, is our future.

Platos sources the PresocraticsPlato drew on a number of philosophical systems set out by thinkers known as thePresocratic philosophers. These tended to look for a fundamental principle that givesunity to all the phenomena. Ill mention three.


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Parmenides (515-450) Being is. Becoming has no existence. Everything that doesnot belong to the perfect world of being is miasma and illusion.

Heracleitus (540-600) believes that the most fundamental phenomenon is change.All is flux. We cannot enter the same river twice: the river changes and so do we.Since all everything is in flux, we cannot know it. Men are taken in by appearances.

Things happen by necessity. Conflict is the father of all things. There is a hiddenharmony between opposites; Change and Sameness presuppose each other andbelong to the same underlying logos. If one does not perceive the connectionbehind them we will call something just or unjust and not understand their unity.

Empedocles (492-432) believed that the cosmos moves in cycles, or alternatesbetween long period in which divisions are proliferation (conflict increasing) andperiods. At the end of each period that is a state of complete stability or completewar.

In Love's dominance all elements are uniformly and completely mixed and bondedinto a single spherical compound comprising all material in the universe; at maximum

strife there is a complete separation of elements. Empedocles taught thetransmigration of souls reincarnation (metempsychosis). As an animal victim isdismembered, its parts are dispersed throughout the cosmos which is sustained bythis supply of material from micro to macro. The tissue of sacrificed animals rise tobecome clouds and then rain, then part of the plant life, and to become cattle againas animals eat and drink, then they refine this fluid into semen from which new cattleare born. The bodies of the first man and every human, and the first cow and allsubsequent cows are dispersed throughout the cosmos, and present in all food.Every drop of water and kernel of grain contains all the bodily parts of any human oranimal are present in it, so there is an infinite regression of worlds within worlds.Each animal is human (or daimon) in another bodily form, sacrifice is thereforemurder and creates a cycle of violence . The first act of sacrificial slaughter resulted

in separated spirits condemned to wander through a cycle of reincarnations, beingsuccessively spat out by the four elements, so the chaos and rage of the cosmos isthe punishment for the crime of animal sacrifice.

Plato inherited from Pythagoras (570-497) the view that the drops of soul that havefallen from the higher circles here take on matter and are enveloped in bodies, withinwhich they are trapped and forget what they were. To recover their identity soulsmust look up, gaze at what is above them, they will remember that more perfectmotion and recover it for themselves. The proper calling of any soul is to gazeupward (theoria). Pythagoras governed a religious community and city, intending therulers to be a strict intellectual elite. This was an Orphic (wandering of souls)individualistic dualist religion of redemption for the initiated through a secret, ritual

and ascetic teaching that purifies the soul so that it can rejoin the divine. Insight intocosmic order makes man himself well ordered. This upward gaze that orders andcalms the motion is the basic metaphor of Greek philosophical thought.

4. GoodnessShould man identify himself entirely with his society and serve his country? Orshould he seek his own way even if that means setting himself against his society?Should man obey the law and conventions of his culture, or should he follow his


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(biological) nature? Is the Strong Man stronger when he follows nomosor phusis,when he obeys convention, or when he obeys only his own nature? Is civilisation justthe weak combining together to indoctrinate the strong in order to control them? Iscivilisation a conspiracy again the strong? Should the strong free themselves? Musteach nation always be two communities, the rich and the poor, the free and theunfree, the well-ruled and the mob? Can the interests of the top and the bottom, the

educated and the uneducated coincide?

Socrates believes that nature and law are not at war. The law and traditions ofsociety reflect the universal truth of the cosmos. But nature is cosmic, whereas law isalways based in the conventions of our own society. But the conventions of eachsociety are different, so how can they all reflect the universal truth of nature?

Socrates and Plato say that the strong man is strong when he acquires all theattributes represented by law and tradition. Then he is also able to exercise the self-restraint that allows him to build a nation and create the consensus that sustains it.He is happy to receive his praise from the gods, and does what is right, which thesame as what benefits the country, whether or not he receives praise from his

countrymen. He is strong when he identifies his interests with those of the nation,and teaches all members of the nation to identify their own interests with those of thenation as a whole.

Socrates does not believe that the interests of well-ruled, well-trained rulers aredifferent from the interests of the people as a whole. Plato writes The Republictoshow how a nations leaders may be educated to control or defer their own interestsand see them as identical. This would bring a leader-caste that uninterested inamassing wealth, or in promoting the interests of their own families or tribes. Theleader-caste would share a monastic poverty, and this would mean that they wereseparated from their own families. The unity of the state requires the abortion of thefamily, for leaders at least.

How to make a peaceful society? Violence in the media encourages violence insociety. If we ban violent stories and images in the media we will curb the worst ofour behaviour and become more peaceful. Plato therefore wants to give us to giveaccounts that portray the gods as good and moral. We could say that these are littlewhite lies. Plato does not believe that it is good to allow our dramatists to present uswith stories in which the gods behave like petulant rivals (as Homer) or even asbeasts (as Hesiod does). We need to control the media in order to reduce civildiscord, so that we all identity our own interests with those of our society.

Becoming CitizensEducation is a training for citizenship and of military service. All our education isabout forming members of society, by teaching us how to fit in. Can the Greeks re-discover the virtues that make each of them an upright and free man?

Plato asks how we can live well. To teach us how to be human is the task of the lawand our traditions. The law provides descriptions of what is good, and then it givesus the means to judge what is good in each case. Plato says that we not only haveto submit willingly to the law, but that we have to learn the law, because it is thecondensed experience of many generations. Plato tells us that there must be


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For a polity moulds its people; a goodly one moulds good men, the opposite bad.

Therefore I must show that our ancestors were moulded in a good polity, thanks to

which they and the present generationare good men (Plato Menexenus238c).

Freedom makes for a mature citizenry which displays all the virtues, the wholegamut of corporate manliness. They are free men, which clearly makes themsuperior to their international rivals, Sparta and the massive totalitarianism of thePersian empire. Athens can be a democracy only to the extent that it is a nomocracy,a society in which every individual is under the rule of law. Our readiness to respectthe law and internalize it in ourselves makes us free men.

But Athens has not been able to follow its own law, or to follow the direction it givesus towards finding the harmony that is the truth of the cosmos. Thucydides pointedout that in Athens the assembly had voted for whoever made the most entertainingspeeches, so that no had the courage to tell the assembly what it didn't want to hear.There was a constant plebiscite, in which the power of a leader depended on hispopularity. The rule of the people just did not allow from anyone to concernthemselves with the middle or long term. Democracy did not allow the virtues and

institutions to develop by which we could decide in favour of the truthful argumentrather than instant gratifying one. Democracy without virtue is a disaster. Athenianshave not learned to internalize for themselves the virtue that brings justice andharmony. As a result there has been civil war, tyranny and terror.

Justice and PoliticsPlato wants to know how to restore society as a functioning political entity. He givesus a comprehensive statement about what good society is based on. It is based on

justice. A functioning society and state is rightly ruled, and that means that it is ruledby justice. Justice is best summarized as the right balance. It is not merely aboutright proportions that makes a situation not only fair, but functioning and even sowell-proportioned that is beautiful. On this very large definition, balance, right

proportion or justice, is the crucial concept that describes what we are looking for inany discipline or area of life architecture, music, sport, business, politics, and ourown personal make-up. Balance means beauty and means that everything works,and that we find our proper places and responsibilities relative to one another so wehave a world without friction, without ambiguity, and without conflict.

Plato wants to teach us how to discriminate between one thing another and tellwhich is better, and so to become good judges and managers. We want to developthe ability to discriminate so we become more expert in our field. In this way we allintend to grow towards whatever is best. The course of paideia must form andeducate all the members of that society. This happens by the education of a class ofleaders who develop excellence. This class will lead. There is an inevitable pursuit of

excellence and this results in a monarch-aristocracy-oligarchy-democracy but thewhole lot is under the law and resources of tradition which is the memory andexperience of that society. We have knowledge but we don't have total knowledge,but we seek to know more, and this involves us in a process of formation, anapprenticeship.

Justice is the most basic human characteristics. We all need to discover justice. Wecan talk about justice as though it were any other skill or craft. We look round for rolemodels and leaders. We can talk about good action justice by analogy. We know


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is a generous act. The most fundamental task of the law is to teach us how to behuman. It provides descriptions of what is good, and then it provides us with meansfor judging what is good in each case. It points to those good instincts that we haveto acquire in order to make good decisions. Without such a descriptive resourceand without the cultivation and care this resource requires we have no means ofsaying what particular thing we want. Plato hopes that the king will be a wise man, a

philosopher, who is trained for his high calling by a strict regime of education, laid outin the Republic, into the secrets of the cosmos. Plato sets out the political optionswith more clarity than anyone since.

Plato also sets out the connections between politics and nature, that is, between therealm of human interaction, and the whole much vaster interaction of natural andcosmic forces. Politics is just a little local example of the same confrontations andnegotiations that go on in nature at all levels of the cosmos.

Law as ShamPlato also sets out the challenges to the account he gives. He puts them in themouths of the interlocutors who drive the Republic and other dialogues.

In the Republic, Thrasymachus argues that breaking the law feels a lot more likefreedom than keeping the law does. Thrasymachus (Republic 338c) says thedominant power in the city makes laws to its own advantage.

Callicles and Glaucon give a stronger version of this. Glaucon points out that we allwant to get away with whatever we can, but don't want others to get away withanything that puts us at a disadvantage. Glaucon introduces the social contract(358e-359b): we refraining from wrong-doing in order that everyone else alsorefrains from doing us wrong. The general public tends to believe that good peopleare weak. They admire the strong and calls good whatever you can get away with.Callicles (in Gorgias482c-484c) says that it is better to commit an injustice than tosuffer one. To suffer an injustice is truly shaming. The majority are weak. They know

that they are unable to resist if every strong man were free to pursue their ownadvantage. They therefore settle for equal shares for all. The law is just theconspiracy of the weak against the strong. A truly strong person will see through thesham of the law, and get on with pursuing his own natural advantage, taking hewants and building up his own position (Gorgias488b-492c). Your natural superioritydemands that you enjoy your natural advantage and gratify your desires withoutrestraint. The life of virtue (arte) and happiness is the unhindered satisfaction ofyour desires. Don't let other people talk you into Throw off all self-control.

The Unruled Ruler and the Misery of LawlessnessBut the people may not be right. The will of the people is not the same thing as right,so a politician cannot merely demand that the government give the people want it

demands. It must be possible to say that the people are wrong, self-deluded or lazy.It is possible for us to say this as we compare this or that people with the law andtradition of the country to find that they do or don't display the virtues of an activeand responsible citizenry. A good people is one who will take criticism from itsleaders.

A good leader cannot prevail over a resentful people. A good citizenry makes itpossible for its leaders and government to be good leaders and a good government.


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A good ruler is able to take counsel, and indeed he can only become a good leaderby undergoing an extensive apprenticeship, and he must remain under the law.

Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) in De Clementia, the first mirror for princes, explains thedifficulty of safely telling the emperor the truth. It is not always safe to speak out, thecountry may be in such a condition that a good man cannot help. A man may not

have the skill of flattery vital to survive in court. Every ruler knows that he mustimitate the gods by ruling with generosity, justice, and mercy. The wise ruler will bevenerated, and after his death perhaps he will himself become divine.

The master who has nothing to do, and who is not obliged to do anything (by eitherhis friends or servants (because he has none) and who therefore has nothing to doloses the ability to do anything and becomes passive and supine. Whereas the slavewho regularly takes his beating and is put to hard work, becomes strong not onlyphysically, but mentally.

The man only under his own control is a menace to himself and to everyone aroundhim. Tyrants are to be pitied. Xenophon (Hiero: On Tyranny) says the dictator has

no one to control him. No one can prioritise or contextualise his desires for him, sohe does not know what is really important. He wants everything at once. He cannotaccept anyone telling that some things he cannot have, or must wait for. He istyrannised by his own passions and fears and vulnerable to the fluctuating loyalty ofhis people. Absolute freedom, without law or discipline, is therefore a trap.

6. Teachers and their Systems

Four Greek cosmologiesWe can compare four versions of the Greek pagan view of the world, fourcosmologies. They all understand philosophy as a program of ascent that takes thestudent from contemplating bodies, through contemplating souls, to contemplate theMind and what is beyond. It is an apprenticeship based on the view that bodies andmateriality are a mistake, and so it is a means by which we can hope to escapethem. They are, in order of their comprehensiveness, Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism andEpicureanism. We could even see them as levels of a single intellectual system.

1. PlatoThe top level with the most substantial account of the universe and our place in isrepresented by Plato. He offers the account with the full teleology which gives usour place within the entire cosmos and cosmology and a way of moving up thehierarchy of being.

2. AristotleThe next level down is represented by Aristotle. Here the teleology is no longerconnected to a full cosmology. Nature is an autonomous system of drives, a totalclassificatory system and educational system for the formation and moving up thehierarchy of being. Two-nature definition of nature what the thing is now and whatit could be.


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3. StoicismIn Stoicism the teleology has almost disappeared, so the continuity andconsequences of history are minimal. The atmospheric pressure is thinner still. All isonly a matter of the therapy of catharsis, of ridding oneself of motion and passion,rather than of living in a society together. My nature, appetites and self-interestentirely dictate what it is I am able to say, believe or admit to. Nature determines

what passes for truth. Nature is underneath, truth on top. Nature brings theinevitability of competition, erosion and time. One nature theory of nature what thething is now is what it always will be. What you see is what you get. What does notpresently appear in our lens is regarded as unimportant to the observer withoutpatience. Stocism represents the courage and heroism of man pitted against ahostile world.

4.Epicureanism, materialism, atomismEpicureanism is the desire for escape is withdrawal from a universe of violent things.

As Lucretius puts it, It is in the very nature of gods that they should enjoy immortallife in perfect peace, far removed and separated from our world; free from alldistress, free from all peril, fully self-sufficient, independent of us they are not

influenced by worthy conduct or touched by anger Lucretius On the Nature of Things82). The Epicurean wants to find forgetfulness, contentment and oblivion. Thiscomes through forgetting history, memory, continuity and consequences.

These four systems are always present. They have been so crucial to the intellectualhistory of Europe, and through Europe the world (and they were only Greekdevelopments of wider Indo-European and Asiatic worldviews anyway). The morewe think we have either evolved away from them, or have aggressively rooted themout, the more they are firmly grounded, not only in - but at much deeper level in thelogic on which all our worldviews are carried. All four systems are present andrepresented in the modern and postmodern worldviews. They are represented todifferent degrees in different academic disciplines.

Aristotle Man is the Animal with AmbitionPlato had many students, who together constituted the Academy. But the bestknown is the one who had a substantially different approach Aristotle. Aristotlesees man is intrinsically social. It is people who give meaning to things, so we needother men give everything whatever point it has. What people believe therefore isvery important, and in any scientific description we can set out what peopleunderstand a thing to be, what the consensus on it is. Men argue about how to livetogether and those this living together is deliberate act, so man is also the politicalanimal.

We work towards goals. Indeed all nature works towards goals. Everything strives.

We need a two-nature definition of nature, that can describe what the thing is nowand what it could be, so an acorn is what it is now, but on a second definition, it is afuture oak tree. Aristotle works with two accounts of who we are: we are beings ofnature, and we are the products of our own total action. Is our being and the functionof nature, or the result of the work of the providing or withholding the reputation andsubstance of others? Certainly everyone understands that what are relates to whatother people think we are: we grow as our reputation grows. Thus we make eachother the persons we are. What being we have is the function of the work of others inattributing honour and substance to one another.


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Man a striving animal. Every animal is a bundle of impulses, that move the animaland keep it alive. We are units of appetite and of effort. Man is animate, alive, inmotion. When we look at animals or at man, we can start with the individual, or wecan start from the motion and life, the impulses and stimuli which move thatindividual and make him what he is. We can do better.

.Aristotle considers everything in the light of what it may become. He offers ateleology, a description of the thing that includes its goals. The purpose of everythingis life lived in public together. Aristotelian political philosophy assumes that man isintrinsically social, and that the achievement of more sophisticated sociality is thewhole point of politics and of life.

Aristotle thinks through the relationship of unity and action. Thinking helps us to actbetter, and to prefer better forms of action. Considerations of how to do better arisein the course of any action. Some actions are better than others simply because theyinvolve greater virtuosity. The end of all action is public life. Our peers judge ouraction, and everything we do is directed to improving our performance before this

public. Our action and theirs together serves to increase the total sociality. All actionaims to grow the market of public and therefore political life. Aristotle realises thatbeingmust also mean action, and that there are different sorts of action overdifferent time-scales. An account of action requires an account of the reciprocalrelationship of action and the character and capabilities that enable it and derivefrom it. Actions occur with hierarchies of y of action, good action, social action andpolitics.

Part of the purpose of talking about issues in public is to improve our performance,so we can make more and better truth statements. All speech and thought is for thesake of doing, and doing better, which means a more social and public doing. Whatwe do determines what we want to do; it gives us our character, which in turn

determines our desire.

Man is the social and political animal the animal with language and intelligence.Aristotle knows that we cannot be examined just as a single body, abstracted fromour relationships and interactions. Vital to who are is who we are trying to be andwhat we are trying to do. It is not just about our existence, but also about our effort(conatus striving) and the direction of that effort (orexis reaching for a specificsomething). We are intrinsically a bundle of impulses and drives towards goals. Wecannot consider the drives apart from the goals towards which they directed. So wecan consider man only in the light of his context, his peers and rivals, and ofwhatever he direct himself towards. We can only talk about being and existence inview of life and sociality, and we can about life only in view of its orientation and

direction.

Pure and practical knowledgeThere are two sorts of knowledge final knowledge, and in knowledge-in-process.There is knowledge of what, which we could call pure knowledge. It is gives usknowledge of objects, and so relates to (natural) science. And there is practicalknow-how, knowledge of how to. We could call this expertise. Expertise is a matterof skills, and a certain form of mind and imagination (technique), and of technology.


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It is the issue of how to join things to together in order to make them work. It istherefore also a matter of making decisions.

We have to gain a certain expertise and become a certain sort of people in order toacquire the first sort of knowledge, knowledge of objects. We have to balance theclaims of knowing and , versus searching and finding out. or pure versus practical

knowledge. We have to make decisions, and it is better to have more rather thanless knowledge to help us make the right decision. But knowledge, or science, doesnot make our decisions for us. We therefore two distinct but inseparable issues ofsciences and skills. Skills include those characteristics that we have called strengthsor virtues.

7. The Priority of Love and IntellectSocrates and Plato insist that the concept of love is essential to understanding theuniverse. The unity of the cosmos is more fundamental than any other aspect of it.For Plato each thing participates in the thing above it, so every refraction or even ahyperlink to the thing above it. The only complete thing is the cosmos as a whole.We exist to the degree we are drawn by love.

If we have some conception of love, we understand that each entity seeks somethingoutside itself, and that everything does indeed intend to hold together. If we do notassume this, we cannot assume that the universe has any coherence, or that it ispossible to make any sense of it. If there is no (single) whole, nothing makes sense,and no talk about the universe makes sense. There would be no point in searchingfor that sense or testing alternative accounts of it; our habit of reasoning would neverhave evolved in the first place. We can only debate and think because there is infact meaning and coherence out there.

According to Plato and Socrates Love is at the top of the universe, and we are all

fractions of it that seek to be re-united with the whole. The fractions love the whole.Love appears to be an impersonal force of attraction, like gravity. According to thediscussion in the Symposium, Socrates thinks love is a form of madness andhelplessness. It is involuntary. We are moved by love despite ourselves. Love notonly attracts us up, but obliges us upwards, by golden threads. We are lovesprisoner.

Christians by contrast point out that it is persons who love. Love does not love, for itis merely an abstraction. There is an encounter of two who are distinct from oneanother, not parts or aspects of one another. Love can only be two or more distinctentities who can encounter one another. Persons may love when they are free to doso. God is free, and therefore free to love. God may love man and may love God,

and do so as a free agent, not under necessity.

Aristotle has a reduced account of this love, and so is less ambitious about settingout the coherence and motive of the whole. Aristotle and the stoics and even morethe epicureans give us increasing abbreviations of the account. These abbreviationsare good for specific purposes. But they cannot help us to talk about various aspectsof the cosmos, or of our knowledge of it, relationship to one another. We confinereality to unrelated departments.


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Socrates does not believe that what is good for him can be different from what sgood for the city. He does not to distinguish his goals from those of his wholesociety. He regards himself as theirs, and them as his own. This is this socialconsciousness that Plato wants to promote through the education programme of theideal city in the Republic and the Laws. He is intending to establish the belief of

Socrates, that there is no gap between individual and many. If there is no playing offthe one and the many there is no violence, no economics, no interests in whichmine can be contrasted with yours, so there is no contrast to be made betweenknowledge and interests either. There is no division between the head and the body,intellect and passion, knowledge and will, knowledge and the object of desire.

We may appear to stay here, but when this life, that is this life in this present world(eon), is over we will be promoted to the one above, in which we will also make acircuit. We can be advanced or relegated, move upwards or downwards. Some of usin this world, those of us ruled by our heads, intellectuals, no longer tugged bypassions and the confused views of the mass, are ready to move up a class, in theirsucceeding life. This intellectual who feels the upward pull of love of wisdom

(philosophia) learns to harden himself to discomfort and to the confusion registeredby his senses. He learns to ignore all the confusion that constitutes the world we areimmediately aware of, and to perceive the order above the disorder. He cananticipate the clearing of the fog, and to watch for the coming of order to the chaos.We have to look for what is general amongst the confusing and changing particulars.


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SUMMARY

1. Creation is the result of a lapse or failure. A series of lapses bring into existence aseries of levels within the cosmos or a series of worlds.

2. We can consider the cosmos as though it were consisted of two worlds which we

can contrast. The first is the original and superior, the second is inferior to anddependent on the first:

World OneOne, unitaryWholeMotionless,Timelessunchangingtruthdivine

World TwoMultiplefragmentaryfluxbodies and materialitypassion without controlaggressionconfusionunpredictablelack of knowledge

The first world is identifiable with divinity or God, the second with creation and man.In this conception God and Man are not only opposites but enemies. On this

conception God would be limited and threatened by something that is not himself;creation and man are alternatives gods, rivals to God. Thus, despite its intentions,God is not omnipotent and the pagan conception of God seems to contain acontradiction.

3. The universe is closed. The past is the origin of all things and it is normative. Thepresent is a fall away from the past. The future can only be more of the same(repetition) or the process goes into reverse until the cosmos disappears and weachieve absorption and extinction. This is the worldview of fatalism.

4. What is valid of man is valid of society and the cosmos. It is a theory about acosmic disaster and the fall of souls into materiality. Souls have to work their way

back up by a series of reincarnations (metempsychosis). The conclusion is that wewill all shed our individuality as we be absorbed back into the one.

5. The Greeks offer us a comprehensive theory of the pagan conception of life, andPlato gives us the most complete version of that theory.

6. How can we find the right teacher, who has the authority to give you the disciplineyou need, who is disinterested and will not hold you back for his own purposes?

4 elite paganism

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