Dear Friends,

The inaugural session of a rather ambitious project to learn the wisdom traditions of the Western world began in a modest way with a group of friends in a coffee shop in a book store. There is a certain degree of romance attached to such a setting considering the intellectual ferment that has taken place in coffee shops all around the world.

There are challenges to face when undertaking such a study. The first being the technical terms used by philosophers. They generally use ordinary words but give them special meanings. The word "Form" used by Plato is one such example. We, living in India, have our own heritage and traditions which have a lot to offer. In this study we have set aside any prejudice and learn with an unbiased mind the teachings of masters whose words have stood the test of time. We still hear the names of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plotinus, Diogenes, and many many others, and thus we understand that their insights are valuable and can enrich and deepen our own understanding about the perennial questions that always vex our thinking species. May this study broaden our intellectual horizon.

Given below is an entry on Plato from the Encyclopedia of Mysticism. The dialogues mentioned are:
1. The Republic
2. Meno
3. Phaedo
4. Phaedrus
5. The Symposium
6. Theaetetus
7. Timaeus

With the help of the comments in the Encyclopedia we can chose one of the above Dialogues for detailed study. We can also conduct our own independent research through the internet and relevant books. Please feel free to share any insights and comments.

For those of you interested in Neuroscience, you may read and listen to Dr. Ramachandran's The Emerging Mind lectures on the web:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/



Plato (427 - 347)

Athenian philosopher. Socrates taught him to search for ethical definitions, disciples of Heraclitus that the world of our senses is in a condition of constant change, disciples of Parmenides that true reality cannot change. Contact with Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia showed him that in Geometry we deal in propositions which are never more than approximately true of the visible world, but are absolutely and immutably true of the triangles and circles we can perceive with our minds. So he came to his Theory of Forms (or ‘Ideas’). True reality is unchanging, and is perceived with the mind. The perfect Triangle is imperfectly materialized in the physical triangle, the perfect Table in the tangible table, perfect Beauty in beautiful objects, perfect Justice in human actions. The things of this world may ‘imitate’ or ‘participate’ in the perfect Forms, but they are never more than shadows or reflections. ‘Plato’ said Diogenes ‘I see tables and cups but not Tableness and Cupness.’ ‘Precisely,’ said Plato, ‘because you need eyes to perceive tables and cups , and you have those; you need intelligence to perceive Tableness and Cupness, and that you do not possess.’ In The Republic he compares mankind with prisoners in an underground cave, watching shadows on a wall (The Myth of the Cave). The philosophers is the man who is released into the daylight. At first he is blinded by the brilliance, but gradually his eyes grow accustomed to the light and he sees objects, nor shadows, and knows the shadows for what they are. If he then goes back into the cave tells the prisoners that they are living in a world of illusion they will mock him. Nonetheless, go back he must.

The soul which knows the Forms must itself be immortal since they are eternal and only like can know it. Plato put forward in the Meno and Phaedo a doctrine of Recollection. The soul has known the Forms before birth, but ‘our birth is but a sleep and forgetting’ and material objects may serve for us a reminder of eternal truths. Plato took from the Pythagoreans the doctrines of transmigration and reincarnation. He expounded the immortality of the soul in mythical form at the end of Phaedo and The Republic. But the soul itself has a rational and an irrational element, and it seems that ultimately the rational alone survives.

The aspiration of the soul to things higher is called Eros, Love. Plato gives an account of it in Phaedrus and The Symposium. In the latter the ultimate vision is one of Beauty. It was a passage which gripped the imagination of Shelly: ‘He who has been instructed thus far in the science of Love, and has been led to see beautiful things in their due order and rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline, will suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful with the absolute Beauty...he will see a Beauty eternal, nor growing or decaying, not waxing not waning; nor will it be fair here and foul there, nor depending on time or circumstance or place, as if fair to some, and foul to others; nor shall Beauty appear to him in the likeness of a face or hand, nor embodied in any sort of form whatever...whether of heaven or of earth; but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither increase nor diminution, nor any other change...O think you...that it would be an ignoble life for a man to be ever looking thither and with his proper faculty contemplating the absolute Beauty and to be living in its presence? Are you not rather convinced that he who thus sees Beauty as only it can be seen, will be specially fortuned? and that, since he is in contact not with images but with realities, he will give birth not to images, but to Truth itself? And being thus the parent and nurse of true virtue it will be his lot to become a friend of God, and so far as any man can be, immortal and absolute.’ (Sym. 210E-212A tr. R. Bridges.)

In The Republic the ultimate is the Form of the Good, Good not in a merely ethical sense, but representing the source of all value and all excellence. As the Forms are Reality, and are contrasted with the material world as Being to Becoming, the Form of the Good is said to be ‘beyond reality’ or ‘beyond being’. It is the source of knowledge: as the sun enables the eye to see and objects to be seen, so the Form of the Good enables the mind to know and the Forms to be known. Scholars have argued whether Plato identifies the Form of the Good with God. Certainly he does not explicitly do so.

In Theaetetus (176 A-B) Plato wrote that because of the imperfections of earth we ought to try to escape as speedily as possible to the place of the gods. To escape means so far as possible to become like God; and that means to combine righteousness and holiness with wisdom. This concept of ‘likeness to God’ is frequently quoted by later writers.

Plato’s most influential work on subsequent religious thought was Timaeus, a kind of hymn of creation. The divine Craftsman is good and desires all things to be like himself. So he brings order out of chaos and fashions a world-soul; the cosmos is thus a living creature endowed with life and intelligence. The material universe includes fire and earth to make it visible and tangible, and the other elements to give it proportion. The Father creates the divine heavenly bodies, the visible gods; and entrusts to them the fashioning of the mortal part of man; he himself creates, from what is left over from the creation of the world-soul, souls equal in number to the stars. Physical objects are produced by the imprint of the Forms on matter within the Receptacle of space. The vital aspect of the cosmology of Timaeus is that soul bridges the worlds of being and becoming.

Plato is somewhere at the root of nearly all Western mystical philosophy.



Socrates preparing to drink hemlock