The Practice of Philosophy in Plato and Plotinus

An Exploration

Bennett

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532642081
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

Plato said over 2,500 years ago that "an unexamined life for a man is not worth living." To examine one's life, on a regular basis, cannot but lead to a consideration of virtue, which in turn leads to a search for the Good, which both Plato and Plotinus say all men naturally seek. What we call a good informs the value system we live by, but a good can only reflect the Good, if it is good for our soul and the soul of our neighbor, any more than we can claim virtue with a mote in our eye. Are the wrongs perceived in society also in ourselves, for where else could they have come from? So we need a different kind of inquiry and a different order of reflection; an inquiry that reveals errors in how we see things and a reflection that seeks a spiritual dimension to how we see things. It does not matter if it is called contemplation or meditation, for the principle of prayer has been with us ever since man first intimated the presence of the Divine.

Chapter 1

Self-Examination

The examined life:

“Perhaps someone might say: But Socrates, if you leave us will you be able to live quietly, without talking? Now . . . if I say that it is for the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less.”

(Apology 38 a)

If the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’ then the obvious inference is that the ‘examined’ life, is worth living; but what constitutes such an examination, and what is the greatest good it leads to? In a different age and clime we are not used to discussing virtue, but we do perhaps discuss the ethics or morality of a given current situation more than we might imagine. We expect, for example, that our politicians—those we elect to represent us, would speak the truth, and yet some have shown to be outright liars, while the refusal to answer sensitive questions has become more than anecdotal. We appear to live in an age where there are those who do not examine the self-centeredness of their lives, where values are not those of a consensus because all opinions are valid, and those who clearly have values, but that they wish to impose those values upon others without any discussion or resort to reason; or we have the verbal sleights of hand so what the word democracy referred to by Hitler or Stalin in WWII was virtually the opposite of what it referred to in Plato’s time. It is not uncommon to ‘sign up’ for something, like membership of an organization, to find that one has also signed up for things that one would not or does not agree with, and which were not mentioned at the time, rather like the fine print on a contract. On one side we have the, often-cursory examination of a life represented by the obituary, or even, biography, and on the other side, the kind of self-examination that is found in the tragedies in our literary traditions. Had Haigh and others on the battlefront in Word War 1, learnt the lessons of Crecy and Agincourt, that mere numbers are not the equivalent of technology, i.e. the Welsh Long Bow; that pointless tragedy could have been predicted and thus avoided. Our individual histories will be a mixture of lessons learnt and lessons not learnt, in the example of Shakespeare’s tragic hero’s, many do not consider examining their lives until they realise they are approaching their ‘end’: as in Richard II’s ‘Sometimes I have been . . . ;’ Macbeth’s ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . . ’; and the tragic irony of Lear who can only see his life when he has been blinded. The obvious moral is that it is a bit late to examine one’s life when the end of it is approaching one’s horizon.

To ‘examine a life’ refers to the reflexive or self-reflective ability of human beings; that is the ability to reflect on not only what appears to happen to them as individuals, but also their actions in response to those situations, irrespective as to whether those situations were seen in a negative or a positive light at the time. This is quite different form learned behavior, which is sometimes mistaken for intelligence. But it goes a lot further than this; by implication, the ‘unexamined life’ has no aims or goals; the ‘unexamined life’ does not include any consideration of another, another as a human being—save that they have been viewed as a means to some end that motivates it; if it has an aim, it is to promote selflessness, not selfishness. ‘To examine’ in this Socratic sense does not just apply to crises, but is longer term, and is a two-stage process: appraisal followed by valuation, which would obviously include what is valued, and what is valued may not be based on a rational judgement, but on a disposition or preference. It will include what has been acquired, as distinct from what is possessed, as distinct from what is perceived as ‘missing.’ To ‘examine the life’ is perhaps a natural consequence of following the injunction of Apollo at Delphi: ‘Know thyself.’9

The connection between the two is made explicit in the Phaedrus: Socrates is explaining to Phaedrus about the legends connected with their place ‘under the cicadas’ and his lack of interest in them:

“The story also told that she (Oreithuia) that she was carried away (by Boreas) from there instead. Now Phaedrus such explanations are amusing enough, but they are a job for a man I cannot envy at all. . . . But I have no time for such things (stories and explanations); and my reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to be to be ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that.’

(Phaedrus. 229 d–230 a Nehamas/Woodruff tr.)

A similar point is made in the Euthyphro (6 c–d). And of course the dialogue ends with Socrates’s question remaining unanswered and Euthyphro rushing away saying, “Some other time, Socrates, for I am in a hurry now and it is time for me to go.”

The injunction ‘know thyself’—‘gnothi seauton’—is famously gnomic, and as an ‘aim’ it is sometimes translated as knowledge, or wisdom, or truth; but it is not knowledge in the epistemic sense, but the gnostic sense, while truth—‘aleithia,’ etymologically speaking, is something almost not noticed—implying that in some sense it is taken for granted, and then the momentary awareness of that is forgotten, when the attention shifts again to phenomena. Many of the dialogues of Plato open with the archetypal Greek question, ‘what is it?’ but never reach a conclusion as to an answer. But this is not failure for three reasons:

Firstly; it is that we can then say is what a something is not, in both the perceptual sense and the existential sense. In the Sophist, there are in fact, four demonstrations of dialectic in response to the question ‘What is a Sophist?’ arriving at four different ‘answers.’ Secondly; because Plato (through the character of Socrates) is arguably more interested in the process of reason to discover the truth rather than in any claim to know, simply because it is this claim to know that closes inquiry. Thirdly; no account can be considered as final because of the nature of perception10

What the process does reveal, however, are errors in our ways of thinking, and Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, would argue that most of the objects of our inner considerations—that we call thinking, are subjects that derive largely, in fact from sensory perceptions; a point endorsed by Plotinus, when he says that the problem we have with describing experiences of the intelligible world, is that because we do not go there, as it were, very often, so most of the language we use is derived from use with respect to the sensory world, and is therefor either imprecise, or is actually erroneous. An important second point might also be made about the ‘what is it`?’ question, and it is due to the assumed epistemology of the question: as with Plotinus’s paraphrase, of Timaeus’s distinction between what is and what is becoming, in Ennead V 5:1, which is a beautifully clear distinction between that apprehended by the Intellect and that apprehended by sense-perception; the former is internal, and the latter is external—the terms internal (the rational and affective domains) and external (the domain of objects perceptible by the bodily senses) referring to the body.

There are in fact two issues here: the first is what we normally ‘think’ about—the objects of our inner attention; and secondly, how we think about those objects. If we could change the way we think about things, and perhaps more importantly, as is argued later, what we think about, the way we see things might change, and then the way we understand things might then also change; we might discover for example, that the primary distinction Timaeus makes between ‘that which is, and that which is always becoming’, is not theory, but a reality (cf. Timaeus 28 a). There is also a passage in the Theaetetus 154 e–155 a, which in essence is an appeal to reason.

For example, such a principle (Timaeus 28a) stands in opposition to the way we normally see things, because while we accept that the phenomenological world is constantly changing, we attribute a reality not only to change, but also to the things that are changing; the error lies in the conflation. The truth is always simple, but if the truth is mixed with what is not true, then it is no longer simple, and the only reason why that might take place is when something is actually being perceived as more important than the truth itself. The words ‘the whole truth’ are also simple because it is whole, but if the account given contains omissions it can no longer be whole, and therefore also becomes no longer simple. Why some things may be omitted is for exactly the same sort of reason why things will be added, that is, simply because something else is being put in front of the truth, and to create a different appearance of it. With the assertion of denial, we then have the problem of ascertaining by other means, whether the denial is true, or if it is based on what is not true. But there are clearly two levels for this; the first is in everyday conversation, for we know that a stated untruth will always return, like a ghost, to haunt the speaker, whereas a stated truth does not. But the second, is perhaps more important for it concerns the nature of our inner conversations. It is said, ‘that the truth sets one free, while the untruth binds us,’ what it does is to bind us to that untruth, and the cause of the untruth lies as before, in putting something before or in the place of, the truth.

Perceptual issues:

The relationship between how we see things and how we talk about them is an interactive one, and the one influences the other, even if one does not mirror the other. But the exact relationship will vary from individual to individual, as it will from subject to subject, which then of course raises it as a subject for ‘inspection.’ If we begin to see how we think about things—and that includes the way we see them, we would begin to see how our perceived world is a construct, just like the ‘person’ we take to be the perceiver of it, full of priorities that are not always rational, like the invention of things to decide upon. In the next chapter, one aspect of this considered, is the direction we (habitually) face, and like the ‘prisoners in the cave’, things will be seen differently if we turn round. Plotinus says, “no eye ever saw the sun without becoming sun-like,” (Ennead I 6:9), which will be considered in more detail later; suffice it to say, that there is clearly a relationship between knowledge and perception, but that is not to say as it is put at the opening of the Theaetetus, that ‘knowledge is perception.’

“So if the soul, Alcibiades, is to know itself, it must look at a soul, and especially at that region in which what makes a soul good, wisdom, occurs, and at anything else which is similar to it . . . ”

(Alcibiades I 133b Hutchinson tr.)(cp. Ennead V I 10)

This, of course, raises the question as to which is of the greater importance: investigating the object being perceived, or investigating the means by which it is perceived. If the choice is extended to include the ‘seer of the sight’, then we are moving back towards ‘Know Thyself,’ because ‘the seer of the sight’ cannot be separated from the seeing, but the seer of the sight is clearly not the same as that which is seen.

There is a kind of ‘seeing’ which is sometimes experienced, when somehow the seeing comes from a different place, and it includes the normal seeing, rather like an actor not only seeing the scene from the viewpoint of their character, but also all the other actors playing their parts, and what is known that one is not the part being played, so that part cannot be oneself because it can be seen as a part that is played. Having ‘the eye of the right kind’ and subjects that are ‘akin,’ are clearly aspects of the principle mentioned earlier: “to see the sun one must become sun-like.” If, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Genesis: The Practice of Philosophy in Plato and Plotinus
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Self-Examination
• Chapter 2: The Pursuit of Virtue (Arete)
• Chapter 3: The Pursuit of the Good (Agathos)
• Chapter 4: Inquiry
• Chapter 5: Contemplation
• Afterword
• Bibliography