Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Plato, who was born c. 429 BC, originally wanted to be a poet but around 407 he met Socrates, was inspired by the older man and decided to devote himself to philosophy. He travelled a lot, in southern Italy and Sicily, and is reported to have had a number of adventures, in one of which he may have been detained at Aegina, and released only after paying a ransom. Returning to Athens, he founded his famous Academy, about a kilometre outside the city, beyond the Dipylon gate, named in honour of the hero Academus, whose tomb was nearby. (There would be four prominent schools in Athens: the Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa–home of the Stoics–and the Garden of Epicurus.) Apart from his championing, and reporting, of Socrates’ views, Plato shows all the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘raw thought’ approach to understanding the world. He had a fantastic range and, unlike Socrates, he wrote many books. In the Phaedo, he defends his theory that the soul is immortal (discussed in the last chapter); in the Timaeus (an astronomer) he explores his famous theory of the origins of life, recounted as the myth of the imaginary continent of Atlantis and how the Athenians defeated the invasion of the bull-worshipping sea-power. Plato then lapses into his familiar mystical intuitionism when he says that Timaeus introduced God as the intelligent, effective cause of the whole world and its moral order, but ruling at times in ways that we can never know.47 The Timaeus would find echoes in Christianity (see below, Chapter 8).

  With great inventiveness, Plato also contemplated the mathematicisation of nature. The cosmos, he said, was the handiwork of a benevolent craftsman, a rational god, the Demiurge, the personification of reason. He it was who had created order out of chaos and, taking over Empedocles’ idea of the four roots–earth, water, air and fire–and under Pythagoras’ influence also, Plato reduced everything to triangles. Equilateral triangles were the basic entity of the world, he said. This ‘geometrical atomisation’ explained both stability and change. It was already known in Plato’s day that there are only five regular geometrical solids: the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron (twenty equilateral triangles), the cube, and the dodecahedron (twelve pentagons). Plato linked each of these with the roots: fire = tetrahedron; air = octahedron; water = icosahedron; earth (the most stable) = cube. The dodecahedron, he said, was identified with the cosmos as a whole. What matters here is not the slippery way Plato links the five shapes with the four roots, and ropes in the cosmos to even up the numbers, or the way he conveniently ignores the fact that a cube is not composed of equilateral triangles; instead, Plato’s proposal that each of these solids (the ‘Platonic solids’) could be decomposed into triangles and resurrected in different ways, to produce different substances, develops and refines the ideas of a basic material in the universe, beneath appearances, which accounts for stability and change at the same time. This is not so very different from the view we have now.48

  But the heart of Plato’s doctrine, where he is at his most influential but also his most mystical, was the theory of ‘ideas’. This word, which really means ‘forms’, was first used by Democritus to designate atoms, but Plato gave it an entirely new twist. Plato seems to have believed that he was building on both Socrates and the Pythagoreans: Socrates had argued that virtue existed in and of itself, independently of virtuous people; the Pythagoreans had revealed abstract order, the pattern of numbers underlying the universe. To this Plato added his own contribution, first and foremost related to beauty. He conceived it possible to proceed from contemplation of one beautiful body to another, and another, to the notion that there existed, in another realm, ideal beauty, the idea in its purest form. The pure essence of the Beautiful (and other forms, like Goodness and Truth) became available to the initiated through study, self-knowledge, intuition, and love. For Plato, the world of being was organised at four levels: shadows, perceptible objects, mathematical objects and ideas. In the same way, knowledge existed in four states: illusion, belief, mathematical knowledge, and dialectic (inquiry, discussion, study, criticism)–which eventually provided access to ‘the supreme world of ideas’.49

  This all-embracing theory even encompassed politics as Plato tried to imagine the ideal city. In the Republic, he dismissed the four ‘impure’ forms of government (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny) and in their place imagined a system where the specific aim was to produce ideal governors. Initially, men must be free to develop themselves as Socrates had indicated, so women and children were held in common. This freed men to pursue a strict system of education: gymnastics (from the age of seventeen to twenty); the theory of numbers (twenty to thirty years); and finally the theory of ideas (thirty to thirty-five years). The graduate of this system would thus be fit to fulfil office between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, when he would retire to his studies.50 In the Laws Plato carried his theories much further. Here too he envisaged an early form of communism of possessions, women and children. The main aim now was to protect the individual from ‘the tumultuous attractions of his instincts’ and so regulations were rampant. Education, heavily weighted to mathematics, was the prerogative of the state. Liberty all but disappeared: women inspectors could enter young households at will. Pederasty was proscribed (a great innovation this), as were journeys abroad for those under the age of fifty. At the same time, religion was compulsory–unbelievers were shut up in a ‘house of correction’ for five years, until they saw reason. Those judged incorrigible were put to death.51

  To the modern reader, the mystical intuitionism of Plato is as maddening as his energy, consistency and breadth of interests are impressive. His writing embraced everything from psychology and eschatology to ethics and politics. His importance lies in his influence, in particular the attempts in Alexandria in the first century AD, by Philo and the Fathers of the Church, to marry the Old Testament and Plato into a new wisdom which, it was believed, Christianity ‘brought to completion’ (see Chapter 8, below). Plato’s intuition, about hidden worlds, the immortality of the soul, and his idea that the soul was a separate substance, were elaborated by Christian Neoplatonists down the ages.52 That same intuition would irritate later philosophers (such as Karl Popper) who thought its inherent anti-scientific approach did as much harm as good. This issue is discussed in the Conclusion.

  ‘Aristotle is the colossus whose works both illuminate and cast a shadow on European thought in the next two thousand years.’53 And, as Daniel Boorstin also says, ‘Who would have guessed that Plato’s most famous disciple would become (in words attributed to Plato) “the foal that kicks its mother”?’

  Aristotle (384–322) was a very practical man who had little time for Plato’s more intuitive and mystical side. Nor was he enamoured of the emphasis at the Academy on mathematics. (Over the entrance, so legend has it, was the inscription: ‘Only geometers may enter.’) He came from a family of doctors and his father, Nicomachus, was the personal physician to the king of Macedonia, Amyntas, who was the father of Philip of Macedon and grandfather of Alexander the Great. After he was orphaned, Aristotle was sent to Athens for his education, where he arrived in 367 BC, when he was seventeen. He joined Plato’s academy but all his life he was an outsider. As a ‘metic’, a resident foreigner, he could not own real estate in Athens.54 He remained at the Academy for more than twenty years (no fees were charged and a scholar could remain for as long as he was able to support himself), leaving only at Plato’s death in 347 BC. Fortune then smiled on him, however, for at that time Philip of Macedon was looking for a tutor for his son, Alexander. ‘It was an encounter that should have sparked more consequences than it did: the West’s most influential philosopher in close contact with the future conqueror of vast stretches of the Middle East, the largest empire of the West before Roman times.’ In fact, Aristotle got more out of it than did Alexander the Great. Bertrand Russell thought that the young Alexander ‘must have been bored by the prosy old pedant set over him by his father to keep him out of mischief’.55 For his part, Aristotle was doubly rewarded by the Macedonians. He was well paid (dying a rich man), and they aided his resea
rches into natural history by having the royal gamekeepers tag the wild animals of the area so he could follow their movements. In Macedonia, Aristotle also forged a friendship with the general Antipater that would prove decisive later on.

  After Alexander acceded to the throne in Macedonia, in 336 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens. It was now more than ten years since Plato had died and the Academy was much changed. But Aristotle was by then rich enough to set up his own teaching centre in the Lyceum, a grove and gymnasium about a kilometre from the Agora of Athens. There it became the practice for Aristotle to stroll on the public walkway (peripatos) talking philosophy with his students ‘until it was time for their rubbing with oil’. Like the Academy, the Lyceum had a number of lecture rooms but it also had a library: according to tradition, Aristotle put together the first systematically-arranged collection of books. (He may well have believed that all knowledge could fit into a coherent whole, though the present arrangement of his books was made by the Romans in the first century AD.) In the mornings he gave lectures for serious scholars, but the evenings were open to anyone. The day was completed by Symposia, or festive dinners, conducted according to rules that Aristotle himself drew up.56 These dinners were an Athens institution, the equivalent of clubs in later ages. There were rules/fashions governing even the way the couches were arranged and how the wine was served.

  Aristotle spent more than a decade at the Lyceum. During that time he wrote and lectured on a vast repertoire of subjects, no less impressive than Plato’s in its range, reaching from logic and politics to poetry and biology. His attempt to classify everything, and to count what he could, also made him our first encyclopaedist. The irony is that Aristotle’s ‘published’ works (as we would say) have not survived. What has come down to us are his morning lectures, added to and annotated by his students.57 Aristotle was forced to leave Athens when, in the summer of 323 BC, news arrived of the death of Alexander. The Athenian Assembly immediately declared war on Antipater, Aristotle’s former friend and patron, who was by now the general in charge in Macedonia. Aristotle, the ‘metic’, was seen as a Macedonian and so was immediately suspect and he fled to Chalcis, a Macedonian stronghold. This at least had the effect, as Aristotle himself aptly observed, of preventing the Athenians from ‘sinning twice against philosophy’.58 He died a year later, aged sixty-three, still in Chalcis.

  Bertrand Russell thought that Aristotle was ‘the first[philosopher] to write like a professor…a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet’. In place of Plato’s mysticism, Aristotle substituted a shrewd common sense.59 The most striking contrast to Plato’s approach came in politics. Instead of Plato’s intuitive outline of an ideal common wealth, Aristotle’s theories were solidly founded on research–for example, his assistant’s descriptions of 158 different political systems, covering the Mediterranean world from Marseilles to Cyprus. His survey convinced him that the ideal city did not exist, could not exist. No constitution was perfect, governments were bound to differ ‘on climate, geographical conditions and historical precedents’. He himself preferred a form of democracy open only to educated men.60

  His aptitude for classifying the natural world, though imaginative, also acted as a straitjacket for later generations, especially in biology. He subscribed to the view that there was an underlying unity in nature. ‘The observed facts show that nature is not a series of episodes, like a bad tragedy’ (Metaphysics).61 But at the same time he thought that nature was constantly changing. ‘So, goodbye to the Forms. They are idle prattle, and if they do exist are wholly irrelevant.’ In fact, Aristotle turned Plato upside-down. For example, for him the existence of musicians did not depend on some Idea called Music. Abstractions don’t really exist, in the way that trees or animals do. They exist only in the mind. ‘Musicianship cannot exist unless there are musicians.’62

  If he had a mystical side, it lay in his tendency to see purpose everywhere; he thought for instance that every species of animal fulfilled some special purpose, that it existed for a reason: ‘Nature does nothing in vain.’ But for the most part he strained to be logical–indeed, he can claim to be the founder of logic. He called it analytics but either way he was the first to explain deductive reasoning, the science of drawing conclusions from premises in formal syllogisms. He thought this was a basic tool for understanding any subject.63 Logic led his thinking about animals, and in two ways. With the help of those Macedonian gamekeepers he described (in meticulous detail) and classified more than 400 species of animal. For example:

  The eight ‘great categories’ of the animal kingdom according to Aristotle

  I Animals with red blood

  1

  Viviparous (mammalians and cetaceans)

  Two species: bipeds and quadrupeds

  2–4

  Oviparous:

  2

  Birds: eight species

  3

  Reptiles

  4

  Fish

  II Animals with white blood

  5

  with soft bodies (cephalpoda)

  6

  with soft bodies covered by scales (crustaceans)

  7

  with soft bodies covered with a shell (gasteropoda)

  8

  insects (nine species) and worms.

  Logic (not to mention common sense) also led him to dissect animals, because this would enable him to describe their internal anatomy. This reinforced his view that life was a unity; he showed that, inside, animals were not that different from man, or from each other.64

  His view of being–existence–was also fairly commonsensical. It had ten aspects: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, action, passion. The only mystical element related to substance which had two sides to it: action, ‘when its form was realised’; and potential, before realisation had occurred. When a sculptor turned raw bronze into the finished piece, he ‘realised’ the substance.65 This too reflected Aristotle’s obsession with purpose.

  Change and purpose applied to humans and animals. His idea of God was the opposite. Amid all this change, over and above and around it, he proclaimed an unmoved mover which was God. God, he said, was pure thought, pure action, ‘without matter, accident or development’. Everything in the universe aspired to this state, which he said equated to true beauty, intelligence and harmony. This harmony was the aim of learning and here he was, perhaps, closest to Plato.66 The collection of lectures in which these views appear was called by Aristotle himself ‘first’ or ‘primary’ philosophy. Later editors, however, placed this material after another collection on Physics and they became known as Meta ta physika. This is where our word ‘metaphysics’ comes from.67

  Nowhere is Aristotle’s common sense more in evidence than in his treatise on ethics. Everyone wanted happiness, he said, but it was a mistake to look for it in pleasure, wealth and respect, as most citizens understood it. Happiness, harmony–virtue–came from behaviour that was consistent with the nature of man, in other words in behaving reasonably. Happiness involved control over the passions; one should always seek in life an average position, half-way between opposing excesses. As Pierre Leveque says, Aristotle was later accused of being ‘dry’ (writing like a professor, as Russell put it) but even if this is true (and all we have are his notebooks, remember), his ability to stay close to the real, the particular, and the commonsensical far outweigh any shortcomings on this score. For him, humans were born with potential and, given the use of reason and the right upbringing/education, could be ethically good. This was the very opposite of what would become the Christian view under St Augustine and the notion of original sin.

  The very same preoccupations of philosophy were a major concern of tragic drama, a unique and particular glory of Athens. ‘Other cities under democracies had developed comedy, but tragedy was the invention of Athens alone.’68 ‘This tragic poetry, even though the music and dancing which were essential to its performance are lost, remains one of the decisive the atrical
and literary innovations and achievements of all time. It was designed to express the deepest thoughts of which men and women are capable, and in particular, to examine and assess their relationships with the divine powers.’69