Plato, Persons, and the Ascent to the Highest Good

is enjoyment of the highest good in Plato something personal or not?

Some time back, I provided a guest lecture — with much contribution from student questions, objections, puzzles, and discussion. It was intended to focus primarily on the character Diotima’s speech, nested in the very heart of Plato’s dialogue, the Symposium. I actually took the opportunity to work out a few parts of one of my own longer-term projects concerned with one of Plato’s central ideas.

The Symposium has inspired commentators, appropriators, and perhaps even what might be called imitators down throughout the ages. Its depiction of philosophy — indeed, many types of human activity and inquiry — as fundamentally erotic will ever seduce new students to read it through and then return to explore its fascinating passages. It will draw back old friends and lovers, professors whose copies of it bear wear and tear, as signs of diligent study. Or even as the professor-guide with whom I first traversed the dialogue in Greek called it, an inability to put the book away, because every time one opens it, it opens in the reader’s mind new, gnawing, aching questions.

The Symposium is also — and this comes through to some extent even through the stuffy English translations we inflict on undergraduates — one of the finest works of Western literature. Plato displays his nearly incomparable mastery of the very imitative arts, poetry not as divine inspiration but as ceaseless craft, though situating the discussion several levels down within the narrative, then recounting a series of speeches on love.

These speeches differ considerably from each other in the styles by which they reproduce those characteristic of modes of language of Plato’s time:

• the legal expert proposing changes and clarifications (Pausanius)

• the Gorgian master of inventive rhetoric (Agathon, whose party it is)

• the comedian (Aristophanes) constructing a hilarious story about sex and human origins

• the doctor imposing a dry physicalist understanding on love (Eryximachus)

And then the centerpiece speech — with all the dross of these earlier speeches burned away — incorporates, interweaves, and burnishes to a blinding shine all their golden strands.

The opportunity to converse with eager, well-prepared, quick thinking students focusing on a thinker and text right at the core of Western philosophy is one I do not get everyday, So when offered that chance by a friend and colleague, I grasped it with just as much resolution as gratitude.

The Good in Theistic Platonism

Somewhere along the line in my formation and career, some time ago, I recognized — though I struggled against this as well! — my own philosophical temperament and direction to fall within the broad spectrum of what is most adequately termed Christian Platonism. There are challenging problems and thorny issues to be tackled for anyone working within that multifarious and immeasurably rich tradition.

So, the invitation to give this talk also offered me the chance — unforeseen by my host and his intellectual charges — to start work in earnest on one set of those problems and issues: puzzles concerned with the highest good and personhood.

My own view is that there are tensions in Plato’s writings, and in its undergirding and engaging thought, that remain unreconciled in his work. It is also my view that certain of these tensions only became adequately articulated, made more pressing and perplexing, and then fully worked through via the dynamically developed interplay of revealed monotheist religion (Judaism and Christianity) with ancient philosophy in early Christian philosophy.

Since my goal was not to argue this or even fully explain it in my lecture, nor is it here, and I will simply mention that meditation on the implications of personality or personhood as an attribute of the divine revealed to early Christian philosophers a new and better way of understanding the Platonic Good beyond being, one which Plato could presumably have reasoned out but in fact did not.

Returning to the question I set before the students, the question of the day was this: Does the Platonic ascent to the highest good, as Socrates (or Plato, or Diotima) lays this out in the Symposium, require stripping away personality as one ascends?

In order to know and to enjoy the highest good, must one move away from the individual, the material, the narrational and historical, the relational, the personal, the what-makes-me-me and what-makes-you-you? Is the enjoyment a state in which personality, personhood is at best something superfluous? After all, it does seem very clear that the Form of the Good (or the Beautiful) is itself impersonal, beyond personality, personhood, equally enjoyable by all and any who ascend to it.

A Broader Four-Part Project

As I mentioned to the students, what I was up to in asking them these questions formed part of a larger project, one in which I want to problematize the fairly standard picture of the ascent to and enjoyment of the highest good (and even the goods just below it) in Plato’s philosophy. This might take the form of just an article, or it might eventually lead into a (hopefully) thin book — that’s the beauty of research and scholarship in the humanities: unlike the social sciences we do not just begin with a hypothesis and then start thinking of how to test it “scientifically,” but start digging and see where the phenomena leads us, what it opens and offers to us, what it cajolingly suggests as objects or even just clues to follow out by further study.

In its present form, this project consists of four parts — and, with a jokingly intertextual Tolkien reference, I might call them Up the Ladder and Back Again.

First, there’s getting very clear about precisely what the ascent — from the love of or desire of a single body all the way through intermediary objects to the highest good — consists in.

Second, after thinking about what that highest good is like, what the progressive stages have demanded of its seeker, what process of turning the soul away from particular objects and personal idiosyncrasies has engaged a human subject more and more with the universal, the eternal — after mulling over the image of enjoyment that strikes our minds when we first (or perhaps for the tenth time) read through the Symposium (and through the other canonical Platonic texts that narrate similar ascents to the Forms and even to the Form of the Good) — we have to actually look closely at what Plato says about the condition of those fortunate enough to be in such enjoyment. We have to ask whether there remains any element of the personal. Even more we have to ask whether this element of personal life and interaction is something merely not incompatible with the enjoyment or whether it is an essential moment of Plato’s characterization.

Third, stepping back down the ladder, we turn to scrutinize, to (using that so common Socratic locution) scope out (skopein) the higher intermediary rungs, those higher than the beautiful souls: knowledges (epistemai, but really the level of the Forms , or the virtues) and laws or institutions (nomoi). If we read more attentively in the Symposium, if we fill in gaps in the account by bringing in passages from other Platonic dialogues, if we consider precisely how one is drawn to, fills the eyes of one’s mind with, and comes to enjoy the grasp or even possession or sharing of these higher goods and beauties — those which make souls good and beautiful — if we do all of this, perhaps we might arrive at the conclusion that personality remains essentially involved at these levels.

Fourth, I think there might be something to be gained by reading into the Symposium account of beauties of body and soul, and the friendships and loves arising from, pursuing, shaping, celebrating, or even agonizing over (e.g. in Alcibiades’ case!) beautiful bodies and souls, the many available examples peppering the narrative or dramatic structures of so many of the other dialogues. I would like to strike on these cords so that they resound at the same time as the main melody, coloring our tonal perception of it. At this level, of course, there is no question of whether personality is essentially involved or not. But, I want to bring back something often left out when we think about the Platonic ascent, casting our mental gaze upwards at the intelligible analogue to the dazzling sun, and that is that in the Symposium account these persons, the relationships of love or friendship, are essential, necessary preconditions and prefigurations of the ascent.

The Ascent to the Highest Good

What I led the class through in the talk was just the first part and a portion of the second part. There is only so much to be accomplished in 50 minutes after all! And, since I don’t presume my readers to have read or have perfect recall of precisely what the ascent to the Form of the Good looks like, before just mentioning a bit about the second part, here’s a fairly common (though admittedly a bit Oxfordy, and at some points dubiously rendering) translation of several key passages:

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

This, my dear Socrates. . . is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible — you only want to look at them and to be with them.

But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty — the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life — thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine?

These passages actually come after the fuller, more detailed depiction of the ascent. First comes disciplining the love of beautiful bodies:

[H]e who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only — out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms

The next rung on the ladder moves us from the body to the soul:

in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him. . .

The ascent now proceeds in its next two steps by looking to what generates beautiful souls:

until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution. . . .

Finally, he will grasp the beauty and goodness lying beyond all particularity (even that of universals):

a nature of wondrous beauty . . . a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another . . . . or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things.

Now, it is very easy, even natural, to be led into thinking that this enjoyment is a singular absorption of the knower in the known, the lover in the loved (which is the eminently lovable), the soul (which for Plato is, yes, clearly the real person) rapturously contemplating the Form of the Good.

There is then no need for other people. Indeed they would only be a distraction, would they not? That is a question I answered in the lecture — a question answered negatively, if we are looking solely at the Symposium. But if we look to others of Plato’s texts, we can actually derive a positive answer: the enjoyment of the highest good does involve other persons, and relationship with them.

Before we travel down into the Platonic texts, into depictions of the afterlife, or the life before available through reminiscence, or verbal representations of the ascent to the Forms and to the Good, I must make one clarifying remark: I am not in any way claiming that the Form of the Good itself in Plato’s own view is itself something imbued with any aspect of personality. In fact, his texts clearly suggest otherwise.

It is true, of course, that later broadly Platonic thought will explicitly depict the highest good as fundamentally personal, for Christians, Jews, and Muslims will understand it as God. But, that is a much later development, and I am sticking with Plato’s own writings on this matter. For in those very texts, the enjoyment of the Good is carried out as a person in community with others.

Prospects After Death: Plato’s Apology

Let’s start with a text which doesn’t mention the Forms or the Form of the Good at all, but does contain some interesting speculation about a good afterlife: the Apology. Socrates consoles himself and those Athenian jury members who voted on his side — after a rather weak argument about why the “big sleep” might not be so bad — with a different set of considerations.

But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs.

Notice two things.

First, there is no effacement of personality. The wonderful state after death is one in which one gets to confer with the judges and poets and heroes of times past, as individuals.

Second, this is almost anti-Homeric, for when Odysseus voyages to Hades, all he gets to converse with are shades, whom he has to feed with sacrificed blood before they can effectively speak. Entering this Platonic afterlife, by contrast, the pilgrim arrives at a better place, is judged by those who do so rightly and fully, discusses with all those great craftsmen who worked in song and stories, words and passions, even laws and regimes — those who, at least if Protagoras is right in that dialogue named after him, were among the first sophists or possibly philosophers. Socrates continues:

Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true

Notice in this passage an important shift in what is being depicted. In the life after death, the philosopher gets to continue philosophy, practicing dialectic upon the other dead, aiming at sifting out what truths really do hold, who is wise and who is not.

The end of life is the beginning — or rather the intensification and purification — of inquiry into the good and the true, the beautiful and the wise. The Forms, as I mentioned just earlier, are nowhere mentioned here. In fact, none of the higher rungs on the ladder by which in the Symposium the ardent and initiated lover ascends to the Form of the Good are referenced. But, what will this infinitely delightful conversation alight upon — besides the subjects of the persons, the souls of those departed there?

Would it not very quickly encompass within its conversational ambit those higher realities which make souls good and beautiful, laws and institutions which form the persons (and why not also personal friendships, for these have their shapes, their analogies to regimes as well?), knowledges, virtues, Forms, those things in which the soul participates and likewise becomes better in the process? You can bet that if Socrates is involved in the conversation, those matters will inevitably arise.

We are, to be sure, drawing out by questioning something that remains only implicit in the picture of the afterlife depicted in the Apology. The story is the same for another dialogue which is much more explicit about the judgement — of naked souls stripped of bodies, revealed in their beauty or ugliness, their justice or wickedness — that awaits, one which separates the dead into two bodies bound upon different paths for separate fates: the punishments of Tartarus for the bad, and the Isle of the Blessed for the good.

Again, we have to ask what might seem an impertinent, even silly question: What are those blessed dead doing and talking about all that time? History past? The ceaselessly balmy weather? The joy and intensity of their eternally developing friendship, conversation, conviviality?

What about other Platonic texts? There are after all, some which do discuss not only the ontological and epistemological priority of the Forms, but also what we might call their axiological priority. This would be priority in terms of value. One aspect of this would be that the Forms are the sources of the goodness, the beauty, the justice of everything else that participates in those values, as the just soul does in justice. A second complementary aspect would be the Forms’ priority in terms of desirability, enjoyability, worthiness to pursue and prefer to other goods.

The Highest Good in Other Dialogues

Which have been the most important, the most influential, the most thought through and commented upon of Plato’s dialogues? In posing this question, I’m not asking which dialogues we introduce largely uninterested undergraduates to in Intro classes, nor which ones have garnered the most commentary in the over-specialized, publication-hungry, originality-seeking last century?

I’m asking this instead: Which dialogues have been the most central in the Platonic tradition, from the Academy, through the ages, and down to those who read him out of love or desire these days? For at least the top three, that is easily answered: The Republic, the Phaedo, and the Symposium (if we had to pick a fourth, it would likely be the Phaedrus). Perhaps not coincidentally, the Forms, and the purgative, purificatory, initiatory, educative, ascetic, and erotic ascent to these intrinsically delectable objects, figure centrally in all three.

I’m not going to fully recount here the processes by which the philosopher’s soul is readied for the spectacle of the Forms and the highest good, because the goal is to make the case that the condition of enjoying the highest good possible for human beings, according to Plato himself involves persons who retain their personalities and exist in relationship with each other, while basking in the gentle, eternal light.

Let’s start with the Phaedo, where Socrates tells us why the philosopher ought to welcome death, the freeing of the soul from the body:

Many a man has been willing to go to the world below in the hope of seeing there an earthly love, or wife, or son, and conversing with them. And will he who is a true lover of wisdom, and is persuaded in like manner that only in the world below he can worthily enjoy her, still repine at death ? Will he not depart with joy ? Surely he will, my friend, if he be a true philosopher. For he will have a firm conviction that there only, and nowhere else, he can find wisdom in her purity.

The contrast in this passage does give the impression that while the ordinary person expects fully personal existence in the afterlife, the philosopher hopes for something more singular, less personal, doesn’t it? Later, he allegorically reinterprets one form of Greek religion:

I conceive that the founders of the mysteries had a real meaning and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that . . . . he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. . . . [F]ew are the mystics,” — meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers. In the number of whom I have been seeking, according to my ability, to find a place during my whole life . . . . I believe that I shall find other masters and friends who are as good in the world below.

Now, again we see a contrast with the thoughts of non-philosophers who seek a purified personal highest state, to “dwell with the gods,” against philosophers who seem to know better. But, will Socrates dwell alone? By his own words, clearly not. He aims and strives to find his place in the company of the philosophers, and he expects to share the afterlife with them. It seems that the image the Apology and the Gorgias presented is actually confirmed by the Phaedo.

What about the Republic? There, the apprehension of the Forms and the From of the Good is not worked out in terms of a life after this one, but forcibly interjected into the present life. Instead of preparing for it by practicing philosophy on one’s own or with some friends, or by following out lures up a ladder of love, it becomes institutionalized — for one class of society, the guardians who will rule once ready — as a process of education.

Education can of course be individualized — though in such cases it still involves ongoing relationship with the educator, the guide, the teacher. The only pedagogue or erotourgos who could possibly lead an unshackled student step by step into the Forms and beyond them to the Form of the Good, however, would be a person who has already at the very least glimpsed them in only for a moment that has branded them anew and eternally upon the eyes of their soul — an educator with whom the budding philosopher would inevitably come to share converse, joy, friendship, communion when brought face to face with reality itself — what Plato tells us is: “an inconceivable beauty. . . if it is the source of knowledge and of truth, and yet surpasses them in beauty.”

Of course, in this life, in Plato’s ideal arrangement of matters, the reward for the philosophers, those “who are capable of apprehending that which is eternal and unchanging,” those who do have a “vivid pattern in their souls,” who are “ever enamored of the kind of knowledge which reveals to them something of that essence which is eternal” — their reward is that they are required to run the state, not for their own benefit, but for that of the other social classes. But, how does Plato depict this life? Are they solitary workaholics, assuaged only by private rapturous off-hours absorption in contemplation of the Forms? Or do they share a common life of the mind, an extended set of relationships?

What does Plato say in the Symposium itself? At the very peak, where we expect the human person to rest at the apex, he reveals that dynamism was never lacking in the eternal or for those who partake of it.

Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God. . .

This picture is confirmed by Plato’s other great dialogue on love (and also on rhetoric), the Phaedrus, where the love or friendship between philosophers is not something merely ancillary to enjoyment of the highest good, but essential to it. It is not as an isolated individual there, but as half of a couple that “shall walk together in a life of shining bliss.” Indeed, within the circling rounds of the heavens, from which the gods and mortal souls not only glimpse but get to contemplate, to feast upon the Forms — the very self of justice, of temperance, of knowledge, among others — and upon the true being beyond the heavens, the soul finds company and places itself in the company of the gods and of good human souls.

During an admitted digression in another dialogue, the Theatetus — with the youth of that name, who, by the way is described as, like Socrates, possessing of an attractive, promising soul in a decidedly unlovely body, sharing even the same snub nose — Socrates places himself within a “philosophical chorus,” who preoccupy themselves with subjects such as:

justice and injustice in themselves, what each is, and how they differ from one another and from anything else. . . .the meaning of kingship and the whole question of human happiness and misery, what their nature is, and how humanity can gain one and escape the other.

Unlike the worldly, the philosopher does have some insight into “the true life of happiness for gods and men”, not least because he or she is already living it out to some degree in the very pursuit of it. And here, tale not entirely finished, I must end, for work and the day calls.