PLATONISM

Plato, the second of three academically related ancient Greek thinkers whose ideas enlightened Europe during Europe's so-called "Dark Ages," which had been dominated by closed-minded religious beliefs in Christianity, and lead to the "Age of Enlightenment" of scientific discovery.

Strangely, it was a misguided application of some of Plato's ideas that led to the religious theology that so dominated the minds of Western Civilization.

So let's go back to the first cause of this so-called "darkness." Let's review the history of Neo-Platonism. But what is Neo-Platonism? According to the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, Neo-Platonism is a form of Platonism developed by Plotinus in the 3rd century A.D. and modified by his successors.

But before we review Neo-Platonism, let's review the ideas of Plato that have come to be called Platonism.

Plato (c. 428 B.C. - 347 B.C.) was Socrates' most famous student. Moreover, because Socrates was not known to write anything, if it hadn't been for Plato's writings, I would not have learned from the ideas, attitudes, and the inquisitive method of learning that Plato attributed to Socrates.

Unfortunately, however, it was Plato's ideas about the Forms that mislead the Western Civilization into the "Dark Ages."

Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstractions (or ideas), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only true objects of study that can provide us with genuine knowledge. In other words, Plato convinced many people that what we think (and believe) is real and what we observe (by sight, touch, taste, smell, or sound) is not. Even as backwards as this may at first sound, Plato convinced many people that this was true. The following example from his writing (called the Republic) is how he did it. He told the following story in a dialogue as an example.

Behold: human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning around their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like a screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets."

I see.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statutes and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them talking, others silent.

You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

But even if a prisoner succeeds in liberating himself gradually from the chains which hold him in place, and will see people and things and not merely shadows, he will, Plato argues, still maintain that "the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him." And when he is led out of the cave, into bright sunlight, the same will happen, for he will be dazzled by the sun and "unable to see anything at all of what are now called realities." Plato realizes that it must take a long time to learn to see and to recognize as such the "real" reality, and that only a few, the true philosophers, will succeed in it. When he returns to the cave, and tries to tell the cave dwellers what he saw, they will not believe him; rather they will ridicule him and insist that "it was better not even to think of ascending."

In his writing to advance his own ideas, Plato uses characters to say what he himself thinks; thus, in his dialogues it is sometimes difficult to determine what Socrates actually said from what Plato himself thought and said that Socrates said it. For example, in another famous dialogue, the Phaedo, Plato put into the mouth of Socrates several arguments for the immortality of the soul. Since we know certain things which no experience can teach us, he took that to mean that our soul must have existed before birth. According to Plato, it is furthermore obvious that the soul rules the body, which shows that it is independent of the body. Plato further asserts that the soul is the cause and source of life; and, because of this, it cannot be conceived as dying. Finally, being "simple"--that is, not having parts--it is incapable of dissolution, of falling apart.

Also, according to Plato, the immortal soul inhabits the body for a time as if imprisoned in it, and leaves it at death. Death, then, is "the separation and release of the soul from the bodily prison."

Thus, instead of proclaiming that physical substances are the only real things, Plato turned the truth on its head and proclaimed that the only real things are permanent, unchanging ideas; and, physical things are only temporary, imperfect representations of reality.