When I first came to Plato as part of this endeavor, I was prepared to read him primarily as an epistemologist — as a philosopher who has a definite prescription for how one should know things. I was also prepared to see him through the lens of Continental Philosophers who critiqued him for privileging Unity over Multiplicity. As such, he would be an exemplar of the ascetic ideal that places a value of nil on this world in favor of a better world beyond this one. From this perspective, Platonism was in dire need of a reversal. As I have read Plato more closely in the last several months, I simply don’t see him through that lens that any longer.

In this meditation, I want to continue my neoplatonic journey. Specifically, I want to restore what I have come to appreciate about Plato: his emphasis on ethics as “first philosophy” such that his ontology (i.e., Forms) and epistemology (i.e., knowledge as recollection) must be seen as a spiritual technique within ethics. I’ve already meditated on this relationship earlier, especially in moments easily found in Phaedo and Meno where he equivocates on the absolute truth of what he is saying in order to make an ethical point: the moral value is in the search for truth, not the finding of it. To give up believing that knowledge is possible can lead to a passive nihilism that throws the baby of moral improvement out with the bath water of Forms (ontology) and recollection (epistemology):

As for the other points, at least, I wouldn’t insist very much on behalf of the argument; but that by supposing one ought to inquire into things he doesn’t know, we would be better and more manly and less lazy than if we should suppose either that it’s impossible to discover those things that we don’t know or that we ought to inquire into them — about this I certainly would do battle, if I could, both in speech and in deed. (Meno 86b-c)

The problem of giving up on the validity of the ontology and the epistemotlogy is not an abstract intellectual problem of giving up on the possibility of knowledge. Giving up the search is to give up on our ability to be better people, and by people he means citizens — i.e., members of a community living in harmony with the rest of the community. Plato’s separation of appearances from essences is less of an absolute prescription than it is a motivator to keep going with the search.

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Side Note: I want to be careful here is privileging the ethics over the ontology and epistemology. I’m not trying to say that the latter two are mere techniques within a philosophy that is founded on ethics. Such a disposition would be to hollow out ethics as purely a technical exercise — as practice with fake content. Plato’s commitments to epistemology and ontology are authentic and crucial if we are to take our ethical practices seriously.

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I’ve spent some time today (1/31/2023) with the opening sections of Book 7 of The Republic, and I want to dwell a bit on these paragraphs. Two things have struck me as crucial. First, his insistence in Book 6 (509b) that knowledge of the good is “beyond being,” but this does not mean that it is contained by the inferior term “becoming.” Second, the good is not really good unless it is returned into the world as a harmonizing energy. The latter point is crucial and is easily forgotten when we talk about Plato’s “allegory of the cave” from Book 7. When these two ideas are put together as Plato clearly intended, the result is not “the good” as an end of history. Plato does not seek end points, though a simplistic reading of the Forms as a preference for Unity would lead us in this direction. No, that’s not my reading any longer. When I understand “the good is not being, but something yet beyond being, superior to it in rank and power” (509b); and when I combine this with the need to return to this world to activate its energy, a very different understanding of the good as a Form becomes possible.

We have to understand Unity as a moral disposition that activates the desire for harmony as a never-ending negotiation between selves and others. This negotiation does not stand on a stable ground of knowing what the good is. At best, the good is an experience of infinity that returns to the world as what Pierre Hadot called Socrates’ “moral intent” that does not start from an epistemology. Plato’s Socrates does not enforce a view of the good as a propositional definition. Rather, the good as “something yet beyond being” means that it is not “becoming,” which is the lower of Plato’s binary terms being and becoming. To say that the good is beyond becoming and is superior to being is Plato’s way of reaching beyond binary oppositions to seek an exterior. But this exterior — and he is emphatic about this — has no human value unless it returns to the world as moral action. But again, to say that it is beyond and superior to being is to say that it escapes formal definition. As such, the good exists as non-quantifiable energy that seeks harmony between selves and others without being able to define ahead of time what that harmony will look like.

Again, this is not an end of history narrative. Plato doesn’t have a view of history that looks like our post-Enlightenment belief in progress. There is precious little looking forward or looking backward in his dialogs. He provides nothing like the Communist Manifesto as pronouncements about the direction that History is moving. Benjamin’s Angel of History is unnecessary as a corrective because Plato has no vision of History as the seeking of its own end. We only have dialogs that demonstrate, through examples (e.g., Laches, Glaucon, Meno, Crito) and counter-examples (e.g., Euthyphro, Thrasymachus, Protagoras), the power of moral intent to create better relationships among citizens. Plato’s view of history is cyclical and is energized by his attempt to reach beyond being and becoming to experience the good as the idea of the inifinite (to borrow a phrase from Levinas) and thus to return to this world to channel its energy into harmony founded on a commitment to the good as a Form that is beyond all Forms.

Here is the passage that I want to focus on in this meditation:

SOCRATES: It is our task as founders, then, to compel the best natures to learn what was said before to be the most important thing: namely, to see the good; to ascend that ascent. And when they have ascended and looked sufficiently, we must not allow them to do what they are allowed to do now.

GLAUCON: What’s that, then?

SOCRATES: To stay there and refuse to go down again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors, whether the inferior ones or the more excellent ones.

GLAUCON: You mean we are to treat them unjustly, making them live a worse life when they could live a better one?

SOCRATES: You have forgotten again, my friend, that the law is not concerned with making any one class in the city do outstandingly well, but is contriving to produce this condition in the city as a whole, harmonizing the citizens together through both persuasion and compulsion, and making them share with each other the benefit they can confer on the community. It produces such men in the city, not in order to allow them to turn in whatever direction each one wants, but to make use of them to bind the city together. (Book 7, 519c-520a; emphasis added)

“Ascending the ascent” cannot be the desire for anachoresis as a personal end point. Becoming a monk is a bad outcome in Plato’s ethics. To see the good as the most important thing is important precisely because it is not a thing that can be possessed. It is the experience of the infinite — a Form that is beyond all Forms — that can only be made valuable by returning to the world (descending once again) as a moral intent to create harmony. The knowledge one returns with is less of a techne (though that is important for Plato) and more of a gnosis — experiential knowledge that is the transformation of one’s psyche (soul). The transformation of the soul through the experience of the good cannot be summed up as a propositional statement. It can only be discussed as an experience and as an intention to create harmony without knowing what that harmony will look like: “the good” is not being in the same way as a triangle or other geometric shapes. “The good” is beyond being and is therefore a different kind of Form.

Let me try to make this clear. Plato believes in geometry as prototypical knowledge, but not because he is concerned primarily with epistemology as first philosophy. He does not found his ethics on epistemology. Rather, he creates his epistemology and its associated ontology to empower his ethics. It works like this: to draw a triangle is to activate the Form of a triangle, though the picture you draw will never be a perfect representation of the Form. However, most people will be able to recognize the drawing as a triangle. We will see the artist’s intent to represent a triangle. In this way, the Form of a triangle is better understood not as an eternal idea, but more as a pattern that allows us to take worldly approximations and put them to use. Without this idealized pattern in our minds, according to Plato, we wouldn’t be able to see a triangle comparable to other triangles. We’d only ever see a set of lines that are absolutely different from every other similarly depicted set of lines. The mind’s ability to make practical assessments of the world it inhabits would be utterly defective.

But triangle are not simply phenomenological entities; they are not figments of our imaginations. They must have analogs in reality. If a triangle couldn’t be translated into practical structures in the world, we wouldn’t be able to build things like bridges and houses. These things would fall down if a triangle and other shapes weren’t somehow real. So for Plato, geometry is excellent training of the mind to see patterns within reality and to align our souls with that reality. The difference with the good is that it is not a form in the same way as a triangle is a form. A triangle can be defined concretely and proportionally (with words) as a shape made up of three straight lines that connect at their end points. This is the reason why Plato says at 517b, “in the knowledgable realm, the last thing to be seen is the form of the good.” Why? Because the form of the good is not the same as the form of a triangle. It’s not a thing that you can imagine or define with words concretely. However, it is within the “knowledgeable realm” which means it can only be known through contemplation. We will never see the good nor will we see a perfect triangle. We can only imagine that they exist because we have some experience of real things that all appear to share similar characteristics. Some of these things — triangles, houses, boats, shepherds — are more easily put into words, while other things — piety, justice, courage — are not. The good sits above and beyond all of these “beings” because it is not so easily defined.

This beyond, however, cannot be understood as pure exteriority. The good is not separated from the world by a hard boundary. This would be a Gnostic’s view of the world as the creation of an inferior god (Ialdaboath) disconnected from the One, which is the true goodness of creation. In the Gnostic view, this world is not good. It is founded on a lack and is the result of a mistake. This is the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche found in Pauline Christianity. But it is not Plato’s view of the world or of the good. For Plato, the good remains thoroughly and completely in this world as an eternal force that one can and should learn how to “partake in” and activate. This is the substance of what it means to live a good and just life. To “partake” in Plato’s terminology is to participate and tap into an energy that is very real and available to our souls. If it is an exteriority, it has no value remaining exterior to the here and now. It must be activated, which is why the philosopher must return to the cave.

To ascend the ascent, then, is to undertake a spiritual progression that moves from the particular to the general through the use of words as an attempt to define things that are more or less concrete. Eventually, however, our words must give way as we move beyond concrete things like houses and ships to the virtues (courage, piety, justice, temperance) finally reaching an ultimately undefinable thing called “the good” that escapes categorization (it is “beyond being” but is cannot either be the inferior state of “becoming”). It can only be realized as moral intent brought back into the world as a desire for harmony — but a harmony without a definition, only a feeling and an intention. This is what Socrates means by the divine model in Book 6: it is a model of transcendence and return. If the return doesn’t happen, then the entire ethical practice collapses.