Plato the Humanist

Timaeus. Plato - among the first humanists

“Know Thyself”
- An ancient Greek.

(In this blog I will make some statements of which I’m not 100% sure. They are my impressions of what Plato thought based only on what he wrote in the Timaeus. For those Plato scholars out there, bear with me.)

600 BCE marks the approximate date when the first secular humanists lived. These humanists took the novel approach of attempting to explain the world through reason rather than myth and superstition. Among these was the great “maestro” Pythagoras of Samos, often referred to as the founder of Science as we understand Science today. Pythagoras’ philosophy, much like Plato’s, was that the grand design of the universe is composed of related components - all is unified. The sublime order of numbers was sacred to Pythagoras and, ironically, he is best known for the Pythagorean Theorem which he was likely not the first to discover. However, he did note (pun intended) that changing a guitar string’s length by, say, 50%, creates a proportional interval change. It should be no surprise that the Pythagorean followers held Orpheus as their patron god. In any case, Socrates and his student Plato entered the scene some 200 years later and followed the Pythagoreans’ line of reasoning as seen in the Timaeus, a book that relies more on reason than divine beings to explain the world. Considering his teacher’s philosophy that people are capable of thinking for themselves and should not unquestioningly trust authority, it would be amazing if Plato had proposed a creation story similar to Genesis, the Anishinabe story or the Enuma Elish.

Divine beings were used as tools to explain what was virtually inexplicable at a time when humans had no luxury of thinking beyond survival. Plato took the route of intellectually examining what was known of the physical world to explain physical reality. This is remarkable considering many of his statements about the world could not have been easily supported. Plato, however, did not seek support in any physical form; his forms were mental, rational.

Compared to Genesis, where God was the force behind events like Creation and Adam and Eve’s - humanity’s - ability to reason, the idealism of Plato takes us somewhere else. It takes us inward, into the mind, rather than outward, to the supernatural. To use his teacher’s analogy of the cave, Plato believed that humans - some select humans - had access, albeit minimal, to the Truth. This idea, explained in the Republic, is fleshed out in his analogy of the cave. Socrates - a character in Plato's Republic - contends that humans live within a cave where they can only see the shadows of the real world cast on the cave walls. Having faith in this approach, Plato hones his mind on the perfect Forms that exist beyond the cave and keeps the premise that this perfection - which does not exist in this world - is a template used to make the material of the world. Any copy of a Form is imperfect and therefore all earthly materials are imperfect.

We cannot use our senses to understand Forms, only our understanding, to understand Forms. Forms are unchanging; they always are; they are eternal and have no becoming. Whatever the senses perceive is changing, or becoming and are objects we form opinions on. He implicates himself, his mind, in explaining the world and does not implicate gods. He reasons his own way - even though sometimes laughable ways by today’s standards - through the world and explains it as a “likely story” based on his insights on Forms and his premise that he can see only part of what is really happening outside of the cave. From what little he is sure of, he deduces what the physical world is like and how it was created.

A key difference between the Timaeus and Genesis is the message that the strength to ameliorate oneself can come from within. This theme is repeated throughout the Timaeus more than other creation stories that have supernatural gods, although both proscribe ways to live. To sum up a few examples: 47b-c states that when the soul is within our bodies, it loses its perfect shape to the movement and disorderliness of the body... but properly educated and controlled, it brings the being into harmony with the perfection of the universe. 90 c-d: “…to the extent that human nature can partake of immortality, he can in no way fail to achieve this: constantly caring for his divine part as he does, keeping well-ordered the guiding spirit that lives within him, he must indeed be supremely happy.”

The cosmos is a likeness of something from a completely different medium - a Form. All Plato says that remotely implies a god and his motivation is that his end was to make the cosmos as good as possible. The "good cosmos", by extension, includes humans and it is our duty as beings within the cosmos to be in line with it, in tune with it and to do our best to be as good as possible. Knowledge of Forms and truth is to know god and the road to achieve immortality, so the focus should be on nature, not a folk tale god that no one has seen directly or in shadow.

40c-41. These two paragraphs sum up Plato’s reliance of reason and dismissal of superstition. Here is the first of the two paragraphs: [Of heavenly bodies] “To describe the dancing movements of these gods … to tell how many of them are in opposition and in what order and at what times they pass in front of or behind one another so that some are occluded from our view to reappear once again thereby bringing terror and portents of things to come to those who cannot reason - to tell all this without the use of visible models would be labour spent in vain. We will make do with this account and so let this be the conclusion of our discussion of the nature of the visible and generated gods."
Here, Timaeus admits that gods exist but concludes that they are not useful in his discussion because one can’t reason their existence nor can one use a visible model to understand them. Even though Plato didn’t trust scientific observation per se he did seem to require some sort of visible reproduction of what he believed to be a Form, and there are no replicas of gods in the material world.

The hypothesis that order is an innate state of the natural world is one that cannot be experimented on. Instead, Plato approaches this very topic from a variety of angles intellectually. Despite this, he seems to concede that certain things cannot be humanly explained and at a certain point his faith in a higher and good being does take over.

Timaeus explicitly limits his discussion to the earth and heaven (of which there is only one of each) as if to say that there are no other worlds/dimensions to consider, where gods might reside. To resort to that explanation would be a cop-out as one cannot apply ideas based on anything visible in the natural physical world to support it. However, it makes relative sense, based on our knowledge of forms like triangles, spheres and the harmony of mathematics and music, to make certain assumptions of what is visible and to explain the world, a priori, based on this knowledge.

By that date, 600 BCE, humanity had come a long way from walking the line of death and survival, a path walked by our species for the vast majority of its existence and one that necessitated the invention of gods. Today, we are more inclined to believe in what science supports than what myths tell. For this reason, it’s hard for us to even imagine how we would have reacted to rain or lightning prior to and during Plato’s time. To explain such natural events would have been impossible without an understanding of some complicated science. To Plato’s credit he does not explain natural phenomena as the doings of gods (something external to himself and the world itself) nor does he experiment on the world around him. Rather, he looks within. This is consistent with his belief that Forms reproduced in the physical world are defective and that only the mind can imagine these Forms as perfect. For this reason, Plato would understandably be skeptical of instruments that measure the physical world since the external world beyond the mind is unreliable. Here is a quote from his Republic that sums up this attitude: “The stars, however beautiful, are merely part of the visible world which is but a dim and distorted shadow or copy of the real world of ideas; the endeavour to determine exactly the motions of these imperfect bodies is therefore absurd. Instead: let us concentrate on abstract problems in astronomy and geometry, and dismiss the heavenly bodies, if we intend truly to apprehend astronomy”. This attitude prevailed through the Dark Ages when science, technology, the human body and its senses were rejected in favour of mind and spirit.

There is a disconnect between what the mind is able to imagine and what the world exhibits. The mind can conceptualize perfect Forms while the outside world does not exhibit this perfection. As stated above, the implications of this thinking had a huge impact on humanity. Not only did it separate man’s destiny from what the gods desired, it also split the physical world from the mental. But was Genesis not first in making this distinction? Can the fall of Adam and Eve be construed as a rise to humanity’s ability to reason? In a sense, Adam and Eve stepped outside of nature - the nature that wild animals inhabit - and a gift such as Reason could only have been given them by something divine. Since then, humans have been able to develop civilizations, language and electric guitars.