Masters of Atlantis

That faint, muffled, oh-so-distant sound you hear is the Eternal Form of Plato having a hearty laugh.

Plato was, of course, a big kidder. That’s something the majority of his modern interpreters don’t seem to understand, but it’s undeniable. Some scholars acknowledge it in a sort of humorless way by talking about “Socratic irony,” but that concept does little justice to Plato’s true jocularity.

Some of the modern thinking about his ideas could only cause Plato frustration and exasperation, of course. The way people want to reduce the Republic, for example, to a treatise on political systems must be truly infuriating. Expostulations on politics were a dime a dozen in Plato’s day, and what is totally missed by modern interpreters is the extent to which the Republic satirizes those polemics. Children taken from their parents and raised by the state, men and women exercising together (naked!) in the Gymnasium? Bada bing, but seriously folks.

OK, here’s another one: In two dialogues, Republic and Laws, Plato apparently proposes that legislators who want to make new laws must write them in verse and then sing (and dance!) them before the assembly.

One could come up with all sorts of theories about why Plato would recommend such a thing – for example, maybe if they had to put them in verse, lawmakers would think harder about the laws they impose on the rest of us – but there’s actually a really simple explanation: The Greek word for “law,” nome, also means “melody.” It’s a pun, the purpose of which – it seems to me – is to point up the absurdity of the whole legislative process. (Not that our modern legislators need any help in making their absurdity obvious.)

But what I’m thinking Plato must be laughing about now is the latest claim that someone has found the “Real Atlantis.” There have been stories about it in the media for a week or so, part of the drumbeat of publicity for a documentary about the “discovery” that’s being broadcast on TV tonight.

And while I have no doubt that the team of archeologists who made this discovery have in fact discovered something, and perhaps something significant, I am certain that they have not discovered the Real Atlantis, though claiming to have done so might boost their TV ratings and, perhaps, their funding.

It’s one thing to go into Plato’s dialogues looking for the passages in which Atlantis is mentioned and to try to connect those mentions to places or events in the actual, historical world. It’s quite another thing to study Plato in some real sense, to read at least, say, a half-dozen of the dialogues all the way through and give serious thought to what they might mean.

The most common mistake people make in reading Plato’s dialogues is to assume that some statement or line of argument within a dialogue is Plato’s statement of what he’s trying to say. Most often, people want to select something said by the character of Socrates as the articulation of Plato’s position. But in fact, it’s the dialogue as a whole that expresses Plato’s position.

With that in mind, I’m convinced that to anyone who has seriously studied Plato, it’s blindingly obvious, crystal-clear, transparently apparent – in short, very easy to see – that the whole Atlantis story is something Plato just made up to make a philosophical point.

Consider, first, that the two dialogues in which Plato discusses Atlantis, Timaeus and Critias, are the second and third installments in a trilogy of dialogues that begins with Republic.

In Republic, the participants have agreed to construct in words a perfectly ordered society. As I suggested above, there are pitfalls in taking anything about this dialogue literally.

In Timaeus, the discussion on the morning after the conversation recorded in Republic begins with Socrates’ wish that he and his companions could set their ideal society in motion and watch its unfolding in real time and space. The notion of Atlantis is introduced (but not in isoloation, as will be discussed further below) as a story that can be told that would, perhaps, satisfy Socrates’ wish. But to tell the story properly, we must first go all the way back in the unfolding of events to explain the origin of the universe itself. That explanation then occupies the remainder of the dialogue, and is remarkable for its opacity to the modern mind.

In Critias, finally, we are to expect the full unfolding of the story of Atlantis. But it is not just the story of Atlantis; rather, it is the story of a war between Atlantis and a long-ago version of Athens, an Athens that once flourished as brilliantly as Atlantis did, though for different reasons, but which vanished so completely that the Athenians of Plato’s time had no idea it had ever existed – just as no one then living was familiar with the existence of Atlantis.

Plato tells us that his ancestor, Solon, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, learned of these matters on a journey to Egypt, the only society where knowledge reached back into such remote times, something on the order of 10,000 years before. The priests of Egypt told Solon the story that Plato is proposing to relate about the war between this long-forgotten, primal Athens and the equally forgotten Atlantis.

The dialogue then goes on to tell us something about each of these societies and the reasons for their flourishing – and then stops. The dialogue Critias was never finished. The promised account of the war between Athens and Atlantis was never set down in writing.

From what was set down, it seems clear that Plato planned to tell a tale that would contrast the two civilizations in a way that would help illuminate the point(s) he was making in Republic and Timaeus. Based on my own interpretation of those dialogues and Plato’s teachings in general, my guess is that the story would tell us that it didn’t ultimately matter which country won the war, both were going to vanish: Atlantis suddenly, the primordial Athens gradually. Maybe.

As far as the modern search for the Real Atlantis goes, my main point is this: If you believe Plato was talking about a real place in reference to Atlantis, then why aren’t you also digging deep, deep down under present-day Athens to find the 10,000-year-old city that Plato also described? I’m not talking, obviously, about some Neolithic village where people at most had learned to make pottery and not to eat each other; I’m talking about a city that was advanced enough to make serious war against the putatively oh-so-advanced Atlanteans.

Plato made up a lot of stuff in his dialogues that philosophers and historians of philosophy happily admit was always intended to be myth. Indeed, the French philosopher Luc Brisson has written a book on the subject, Plato the Myth Maker, which notes among other things that Plato was the first writer to distinguish between myth and history. And Atlantis clearly is not the latter.

The myth of Er that concludes the Republic and the stories of winged souls and two-horsed chariots in Phaedrus are perhaps the best-known examples of Plato’s talent for describing more-or-less concrete images to illustrate metaphysical concepts. It’s a fault of our modern attitudes, not of Plato’s insights and skills as a philosopher and writer, that we want to take the concrete image as the reality and miss the real point.

2B1

I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”

If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.

Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.

Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.

Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.

Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.

This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:

“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)

The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”

And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)

The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:

Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?

Certainly.

But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)

In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.

Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.

It's Always Now

I’ve been seeing a lot of news stories lately in which people (or politicians, if they qualify) are claiming that one thing or another is part of “God’s plan.” For example, the oilwell blowout that’s destroying the Gulf of Mexico is part of “God’s plan,” according to some. And various candidates for elected office are claiming that they’re running because it’s part of “God’s plan” for them personally.

Oddly enough, these kinds of statements are being made by self-professed Christians. I had thought Christianity was a monotheistic religion, but apparently I was wrong: According to probably the most rigorous monotheist ever, Plotinus, God doesn’t plan, and saying that He/She/It does plan is saying that God is multiple.

Instead, Plotinus says, God causes reality to exist by a timeless, eternally instantaneous, simultaneous, spontaneous sort of explosion of creative goodwill.

Frankly, the idea of God planning things is pretty silly. First, you have to imagine that God doesn’t know precisely what’s going to happen; instead, the all-knowing deity must form an intention to make something happen, then decide what is going to happen, and only then actually make it happen.

It’s only from the point of view of time- and space-limited beings (e.g., humans) that one thing appears to follow another, and thus that one thing appears to cause another. Through a kind of back-fitting, we thus imagine that an omniscient God knew ahead of time that a given phenomenon was going to be the cause of a certain effect; in other words, that God “planned” it that way.

This way of thinking posits that God has “foreknowledge” of events and thus gives rise to all the arguments about predestination and free will. But it’s actually an act of anthropomorphism: We’re imagining a God who “sees” things from a human-like perspective and needs to control, manipulate and micromanage like a power-drunk CEO.

In fact, there can be no “fore” knowledge if there’s no before or after; as I like to say, “It’s always now.”

One implication of this difference of perspective that I haven’t heard discussed much: From our time- and space-bound point of view, there’s a lot that’s “not here” or “not yet,” and this is precisely what enables humans to practice dishonesty on each other, if they’re so inclined.

For example, I could offer to sell you some shares in a gold mine, promising that there is in fact a mine where I say it is and that it will in fact produce gold when I start digging there. Or I could tell you that nasty little brown-skinned people are tunneling into your garden and planning to steal all your goodies and ravish your wife and children, and you need me to stop them.

From your time- and space-restricted perspective, you might not be able to verify what I’m saying, so you might just take my word for it based on your desires or predispositions. But from the point of view of what Meister Eckhart called the “eternal now,” everything is present. So no one can deceive God.

Plotinus and Plato (and Eckhart and lots of other people) taught that the “highest part,” so to speak, of the human being exists in that “eternal now,” but our fragmented, matter-focused way of life keeps us so distracted that we’re disconnected from it — unaware, in fact, that any such part of ourselves exists.

The whole point of real philosophy (and true religion, which is the same thing) is to transform ourselves so as to (re-)connect with that highest, timeless part, which is in fact the true self and the central unity of the self and the one part of the self capable of knowing God. So to put it bluntly, anyone who claims to know “God’s plan” doesn’t know God.

Roots

I'm sitting here with a rather obvious reminder of how rash it can be to forget that things that appear on the surface to be totally disconnected - for example, a nondescript, seemingly dead piece of vine on one side of the yard and a sprig of poison ivy on the other - often turn out to share a single root.

This image is a fairly obvious metaphor for the kind of connectedness I wrote about a few posts back in terms of family trees and "one life," but it's also a way to start attempting to reconcile what might appear to be a glaring inconsistency in my recent rambling divigations.

On the one hand, I spewed quite a bit of verbiage scorning contemporary atomistic-individualistic models of the person as "illusory" and "a betrayal of our true nature as humans." But in my last two posts, I endorsed the idea that the only real foundation for ethics "is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge." In other words, a truly ethical society exists only when each individual in that society lives ethically.

So it certainly could appear as if I'm condemning social atomism with one breath and promoting it with the next. Obviously, that's not my intention. By way of explanation, I want to reiterate the distinction I made previously between "individualism" and "individuality."

I defined individualism as "the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays." I've ranted more than once, in fact, about our seeming acceptance of this externalized model of identity formation.

But I haven't offered a definition yet of what I would allow as "real" individuality or how it's cultivated, mostly because it's harder to define. In fact, I believe the ultimate basis of individuality or "personhood" is a kind of inner core that is the part of us that connects us with the whole stream of life. Ultimately, it's a mysterium, irreducible to a verbal formulation: It's to be lived, not discussed.

So it's easier to talk about the "how" than the "what." And the "how" is of course quite well known, and has been known for millennia. I'll let Plato explain one way of looking at it, and leave it at that for now:

“Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?”
“Certainly.”
“But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”

Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Online at the Perseus Digital Library.

Reasonably Irrational

I’ve been trying for some time to heap scorn on one of the central tenets of orthodox economics, namely the concept of the “rational investor.” Anyone who follows the markets can see quite clearly that investors behave irrationally at times, or have we forgotten the dot-com bubble? But the theory remains firmly in place, not because economists are stupid or because they’re deliberately trying to mislead people, but because the whole structure of mainstream economic theory would collapse without it.

Put simply, economists believe that economies and markets function efficiently because people naturally choose the courses of action that are most likely to give them the greatest benefit. In this obviously naive belief, economists are clinging to the ideas of those theorists of the so-called Age of Reason, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, who laid the foundations of our modern political and economic systems. For Locke and Smith and their like-minded contemporaries, “reason” alone is sufficient to guide all human life and unlock all the mysteries of existence, while “unreason” is all bad and a great impediment to our progress as individuals and as a society.

In particular, the thinkers of the 18th-century “Enlightenment” – many of them Deists, including a number of the founding fathers of the United States – identified “unreason” with traditional and “emotional” forms of religion. After all, they were keenly aware of the violent upheavals of the 15th and 16th centuries, when partisans on both sides of the Reformation engaged in repeated and vicious wars to promote or defend their theological positions.

These cutting-edge 18th-century opinions still hold sway with a large number of contemporary thinkers. Richard Dawkins, for example, in “The God Delusion,” voices the opinion that religious belief persists in our time mainly because of bad parenting (i.e., parents teaching their children religion), and if only we could rid ourselves of this irrational belief in the supernatural, the world would quickly enjoy unprecedented peace and harmony.

The main problem with this whole line of thought is that it takes into account only a small part of the human psyche while denying and devaluing the rest.

This was already the response of the Romantic movement, which followed close on the heels of the Enlightenment and celebrated the emotions and fantasies that had been swept out of the tidy Neoclassical worldview of Locke and Smith. The Romantics restored “irrationality” to a place of value and usefulness, perhaps even giving it too high an estimation; these swings of the pendulum do tend to carry to extremes.

It’s a bit ironic that the rationalists of the Age of Reason looked to ancient philosophy for support for their arguments, because the ancients actually had a much more balanced view of human psychology. In particular, Plato and his followers clearly delineated the psyche into an irrational and a rational part, and though they did argue that the rational soul should rule the individual psyche, they contended that the psyche as a whole should aim to serve a higher, super-rational level of being. (To be technical, this “higher level” is called nous in Greek and is translated generally as “spirit” or “intellect,” depending on the inclinations of the translator; neither term really works very well, in my opinion.)

There are many, I’m sure, who will find it absurd to accord any value to irrationality. But consider: Are our sense-perceptions rational? Of course not; they simply report the facts of our environment to our emotions and our thinking. What about instincts? No, but they're pretty useful in keeping us from starving to death and so on.

What about emotions? Well, as Carl Jung pointed out, there is in fact a kind of emotional logic, which is why he defined "feeling" as a "rational function": We can rate and rank and judge things according to how they make us feel, good or bad, better or worse. And that kind of evaluation seems pretty important to our well-being. But in our modern worldview, dominated by the belief that “rationality” consists entirely of verbal or numerical logic, it doesn’t make the cut.

And let’s not forget the importance of irrationality in creativity, in making breakthroughs. Logical analysis just breaks things down or connects one existing thing to another; it doesn’t produce anything new.

However, ignoring or denying the existence or importance of these things doesn’t make them go away; instead, it simply sweeps them under the mental rug, into the unconscious – something else a lot of contemporary thinkers like to pretend is nonexistent. And from their lurking-place in our mental shadow, they can feed on our basic appetites and drives, and grow large and powerful enough to dominate us now and then, causing all sorts of embarrassing problems and bloody conflicts.

In addition, there’s a tendency toward the thoroughly unproven and frankly rather smug belief that “we” – that is, the intellectual inheritors of the Western (specifically, the Northwestern European) worldview – are the only really rational people, while “they” – all those mostly darker people in the rest of the world – are irrational (“medieval,” “emotionally volatile,” “politically immature,” etc. etc.) and therefore in need of our benevolent (of course) guidance (or the firm hand of a dictator chosen by us).

It scarcely needs to be said, but I’ll state that I don’t think “we” are as rational as some of us like to believe, nor are “they” as irrational. And in any case, I think we need to practice irrationality to some extent. You might say that the problem isn’t that we’re irrational, it’s that we just aren’t very good at it.

Just Gimme Some Truth

“Pilate said to him, Are you a king? Jesus answered, You say I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.
“Pilate said to him, What is truth?” (Jn. 18: 37-38)

This passage from the Gospel of John (chapter 18, verses 37-38) has been on my mind a lot lately, maybe because of the inexcusably prolonged presidential campaign, maybe because I’ve had to spend a lot of time the past few years dealing with marketing and PR people.

In John’s book, Jesus doesn’t answer Pilate’s question. In fact, Pilate doesn’t actually give him an opportunity to answer; it’s a truly rhetorical question. Here we have an upper-class Roman interrogating a Jewish laborer-cum-holy-man and not wanting to bandy words with him; as a presumably well-educated man of his time, Pilate has heard or read the extensive philosophical discussions of “truth” and isn’t interested in hearing some backwater crackpot’s views on the subject.

And in any case, John already has given us the answer: “Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (Jn. 14: 6) In brief, Jesus himself is truth, but the overly worldly Pilate can’t see it even when it stands directly in front of him.

A Zen teaching known as the “Flower Sermon” presents, I think, a similar message: One day, the Buddha sits before his disciples and instead of launching into the expected sermon simply holds up a flower. The disciples don’t understand, they scratch their heads and whisper to each other, “What does he mean?” Except for one, Mahākāśyapa, who just smiles.

The lesson in both cases, I think, is this: Truth is what really IS. Or put another way, every real thing is true, is a truth.

Where untruth enters is in any attempt to describe or explain what is. Whenever we venture beyond the actual object and start trying to give an account of its nature or causes or relationships or meanings, we run the risk of getting it wrong, of falling short, of misrepresenting reality. It isn’t necessary to attribute this to deliberate deception or plain stupidity, either; as Plato and his followers emphasized, every representation of a reality is, so to speak, less real than the thing it represents.

Such a representation, account, explanation or description was referred to by Platonists as a “logos.” Many modern Christians are aware of that word as meaning simply “word,” because of the standard translation of the opening verse of the same Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

But that translation conveys nothing of the many implications the word “logos” would have held for John and his readers. By the time his book was written (late first or early second century), “logos” had been in use as a technical philosophical term throughout the Greek-speaking world (which included most of what we now call the Middle East) for a full four centuries at least. In Platonism, it especially referred to the expression in physical reality of an inexpressible “higher” reality: Just as a spoken sentence is an incomplete expression of a thought, a person or a dog or a tree is an expression of (so to speak) God’s idea of a person or a dog or a tree.

Another way of translating logos might be “narrative,” in the sense in which that term is used by social science types nowadays: a description of life and the world that we believe explains “the way things are,” that gives us a sense of how to fit into this complex and often confusing universe, and that helps us justify our choices and goals.

For example, the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” between the Christian (or post-Christian) West and the Muslim East might better be described as a “clash of narratives.” Similarly, the “culture wars” within American society could also be said to be a conflict between or among narratives. In both cases, I think this way of looking at it helps explain the frustration and exasperation felt by people who can’t understand why their opponents can’t see the point, why they “just don’t get it”: because both sides are looking at their narratives, not reality.

It was the ancient Greeks, of course, who invented formal logic, and I think they were impelled to do so by their own democratic traditions: They saw the risk of their institutions being hijacked by demagogues and sophists who could sway public opinion with untrue but emotionally stirring speeches about the issues. They realized that good decisions depend on good information, and saw the need for a reliable way to separate true statements about reality from untrue ones.

That analytical apparatus still exists, naturally, but judging from the blatant falsehoods so widely stated in our time – by the media, the marketers, the lobbyists, the lawyers and of course the politicians – our culture leaders obviously are confident that few of us have the time, the knowledge or the will to use it – or to “bear witness to the truth.”