Plato’s Dualism and Suspicion of the Body

 

     It was a brilliant insight of Plato to connect the way concepts are formed to a divided psychology, and its imprinting of social/political/economic reality. The idea seems to be: to the extent our social world is characterized by justice, our ideas of things will be just, clear, containing seeds of wisdom when philosophically explored; to the extent that the social world and our psyches are in reciprocal influence dominated by ego, power, and fantasy, our ideas of things will be distorted. This seems a deep thought to me, though I would need to explore it further – what I wrote about the body (and Foucault’s thought, for example) is a step in that direction.

      Where I part ways from Plato and I assume Socrates is the soul-body dualism that he at least strongly suggests as a way to ‘defend a thesis at all costs’, as Aristotle has it: namely, the thesis that a good man cannot be harmed in this life or the next. Plato presents this idea though he never really commits to it. He show it as a problem in Socrates’ genuine concern for the individuals he interacts with as well as in some explorations of Eros where love of the other’s individual physical beauty forces us to think of the beloved’s body and soul as a kind of temporary unity at least. But the dualism between body and soul goes deep in Plato and Socrates. Socrates’ irony is partly the expression of a contempt for the values of the world, which largely revolve around the dominance of the more infantile and egoistic potentials of the psyche, which are themselves expression of bodily life in the world, as Plato understands them. Socrates’ sovereign contempt for the death sentence given him and his impatience with his young friends’ expressions of grief show a marked de-meaning of the body and worldly life. He doesn’t have contempt in the first place for the ignorance, the play with false spins on reality, and the injustice rampant in Athens – he takes these to be the natural product of a culpable ignorance of true value: valuing the body and its psychic economy at the expense of the immortal soul. It is a short step to Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and some versions of Neoplatonism – all metaphysical systems predicated on the axiomatic truth of the body in particular and the material world in general as a prison of the soul and a vale of tears. The goal of all such metaphysical philosophies is the release of the soul from the body – which seems to cohere very well with Socrates’ attitude in the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo as well as less overtly in part of many other dialogs such as the Republic and the Symposium.

        Whatever one thinks of the ideal society traced by Plato in the Republic, it is clear that Plato thinks. This society, or something similar, would embody the higher parts of the psyche, the parts in touch with reality and capable of wisdom and virtue – in short, the soul. A society imprinted by justice, which is to say, by reason, by fully realized virtue, by the soul that actually belongs to the spiritual dimension of pure Ideas – such a society is impossible in this material world. On earth the power of bodily appetites and the fantasies of egos isolated in the prisons of their bodies will always keep all but a very few of us in the cave. Our very bodies, that fact that we perceive reality with our senses as particular appearances rather than contemplating the Ideas with our disembodied mind-souls. This keeps us chained to the shadows we take for real. In other words, not simply injustice perverts our ideas of things, such that the task is to remove the injustice; the injustice itself is ultimately a function of the fact that our bodies imprison our souls by causing us to distort reality; by cutting us off from reality. Sex does this. And the lust for power and popularity.

         Again, that is one theme explored by Plato, a theme that attempts to understand how Athens could execute the uniquely wise, just, and virtuous man as a corrupter of the youth. Plato cannot be reduced to this exploration, though it is clear that he did take it seriously. One can accept key aspects of Platonism without embracing this dualism. If accepted, it does make sense of the idea that a good man can’t be harmed; it makes sense of Socrates’ irony, his reprimanding of his grieving young friends, and the cheerfulness he showed right up until his death by hemlock poisoning.

Morality, the Soul, and the Body in Plato 

          The ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings made me think about this, and reminded me of the first time I thought of it with the ring in the story offered by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic.  This being the essence of morality. Glaucon was basically demanding a justification of morality or goodness from Socrates – for the reader the reference is clear: given that Socrates, who was poor and powerless, – and the wisest and most just – was executed for being a corrupter of the youth, and those with the power to execute him were considered good and just, what good is the good? What good is justice? In the tale a certain Gyges gains possession of a ring which makes him invisible, making it possible for him though deceit, theft, and murder to gain unlimited power to fulfill his desires. Deceit is necessary for power as it allows for the control of the minds of others, of what they see things as; this, in turn, enables the power man to also control people’s ideas of him and those such as Socrates: Gyges is the contrast to Socrates. Gyges has not only the unlimited power to fulfill his every desire, but controls even more absolutely than Donald Trump over his crowd of worshippers his ‘image.’ He is thought to be very good, while Socrates was thought of as absurd at best, corrupt and corrupting at worst; Gyges was thought ‘happy’; Socrates was executed in disgrace. Why be good when you can have everything you want by being evil with the ring, remaining invisible and unpunished? Why is wanting what you should, what is worthy of a human being, better than getting what you want? Doesn’t power make you happy if it is the power to get anything you want? Isn’t, if we are ‘realistic’, the only thing standing between us and great happiness the lack of the power to get what we want? The argument for the ring is simple: if we can only be ‘happy’ when we get what we happen to want, and if the ring would give us that power, then the ring would make us ‘happy.’ Injustice facilitates happiness, if one has a ring.

            For Plato, Gyges is the most pitiable of men, and Socrates the most blessed. That seems paradoxical, but a man is blessed only when he strives for that with is worthy and which he needs. (A dog of a friend once pulled down a whole plate for bourbon balls and ate every one; the dog spent the rest of the evening miserable and vomiting.) Happiness or blessedness is a state of soul. The needs of the soul: justice, courage, wisdom, love, and truth. A soul deprived of nourishment will weaken and decay. And now the crucial point: the kind of desires that Gyges could fulfill with the ring of invisibility were not those of the soul, but the unending appetites of the body – like an addict, the fulfilling of these desires is like trying to fill a sieve up with water.

            I do not accept the identification of the desire for the power to get what you want with the body. Tolkien’s ring story helps me here, and the Catholic Christianity that nourished his imagination. In Catholic (and most Christian) theology, God is love. Thus God cannot be a radically singular ‘I’ as an isolated ‘I’ could not really love. Love is a relationship, and God is a community for Christians, symbolized by the Trinity. Sauron is a pure will-to-power. Sauron’s ring radically cuts its bearer off from relationship, from community with the Creation and other living creatures. The bearer is alone with the eye. There is no room for an ‘other’, for two ‘I’s’. It isolates its bearer in its radical ‘autonomy’, giving the bearer the power to create good and evil, to determine what ‘justice’ is. This has nothing fundamentally to do with the body, though the body becomes, like the rest of nature, an object to be exploited, ‘property’ if you will. The elevation of the self at the expense of the reality of other selves and nature, the severing of essential connections and relations – that is the origin of corruption, and not the body. The body is not the enemy, but our allowing our ‘self’ to become absolute.