What is Philosophy?

The word is made of two Greek components. The meaning of the first is obvious.  Sophos means ‘wise’ and was applied to those who had wisdom (’sophist’). It is comparable to the Latin ‘sapiens’, and both may owe their origins to the Egyptian ‘sp’, which has a range of meanings, including ‘to teach’.

We got both the word ‘philosophy’, and the practice of the discipline, via Pythagoras, who flourished in the sixth century. Plato spent much of his life criticising the philosophers who came after Pythagoras, known to us as the sophists, because they professed wisdom, but often had none. So apparently possessing a love for philosophy didn’t make you a philosopher. At least not in the eyes of Plato. The sophists may have come into being as a result of the success of Pythagoras. They often retooled ideas from the ancient near East, but with very little understanding.

Was there philosophy before Pythagoras? Of course, but the word had no currency. Who was practicing philosophy before the mid-sixth century BCE? Almost everybody. It is what priests used to do and is one of the things the ancient seminary was for (they also taught ritual observance, and administration). Philosophy is not the invention of Plato’s Academy. The Academy is modelled on teaching establishments around the Mediterranean, mostly associated with divine cult. Solomon’s Temple for example, was, among other things, a teaching establishment. The Pharisees and Saducees were the philosophically inclined who were associated with the Temple. They did not always agree on matters, but their role was to debate issues and to engage in rational conjecture.

   

Debate and questioning had always been a feature of civilisation, and we have records of some public debates from as far back as ancient Sumer (third millennium BCE). A close examination of the text corpora of Plato and Aristotle shows that the most consistent feature of their work is a concern with puzzles and paradoxes (the aporia). We have no texts by Pythagoras, but we have an extensive body of writing about his life and ideas stretching from Plato (fourth century BCE) all the way to the late Neoplatonists Porphyry and Iamblichus (third century CE). The same basic pattern of thinking appears in all of these philosophers, which is that the world cannot be known or understood purely in terms of sensory experience. This is because the world is full of puzzles, paradoxes, illusions and falsehoods. The genuine philosopher has to rise above these stumbling blocks in order to have wisdom. Real wisdom is therefore transcendental in nature. And everything is necessarily open to conjecture.

This is one of the principal themes of Plato’s Republic, and many of his remarks in his other works are essentially footnotes to his argument that wisdom is obtained by rising through a sequence of images (aka the ‘Forms’ - the illusory and the false) to the transcendent realm of ‘The Good’ in which all things meet and agree. The Good has no existence in time and space, and no properties to speak of, except that it contains all knowledge which is to be had (the Babylonians had the same idea, and called it the Abzu, or the abyss). The philosopher may then descend from ‘The Good’ via the Forms, and bring back knowledge of the transcendent reality to man. And the solution to many puzzling things.

Of course when Plato talks of ‘The Good’, he is talking of the Divine. But if  he had indicated that he meant God, he would have suffered the same fate as Socrates. He does clearly indicate however, at one overlooked passage in the Sophist, that he is talking of divine things.

Where did Pythagoras get his idea for a school of philosophy, and where did his philosophical ideas come from? Abydenus (a pupil of Aristotle, who appears to have been able to read and translate Akkadian documents written in cuneiform script) is the earliest writer to mention that Pythagoras spent several years as a soldier in the service of the Persian king Cyrus, and travelled with him on his campaigns around the Near East. And that wherever he went, he made a point of visiting establishments devoted to the gods. And asked questions. We know he was in Babylon at one point, and seems to have attended a public lecture there. He also visited religious establishments in Lebanon and upper Syria, in Arabia, and also Egypt (he didn’t get a very respectful response in Egypt, and was passed down the chain of divine establishments to the least important, before he received answers).

So much of Pythagorean doctrine, passed on to Plato, probably via the three books on Pythagorean ideas offered for sale by Philolaus, had its origin in establishments devoted to the gods. Pythagoras was the head of a religious cult as well as a philosopher, which is an important detail which is often ignored. We separate out religion and philosophy, because they are so different from each other now. But this was not the case in the middle of the 1^st millennium BCE, and not the case for the two millennia before that.

This is why it is important to understand the nature of ancient civilizations, since it is nearly impossible now for us to understand what philosophy once was, and what it was understood to be for. It is also nearly impossible for us to understand the nature of religion in the past, since we habitually and uncritically regard it as essentially the same as it is now, just with different personnel, different regalia,  and a plethora of bizarre ritual practices, many of them murderous.

Philosophy is about asking questions, and conjecture about how reality makes sense beyond purely physical descriptions of the world, and beyond mathematical and geometric understandings which don’t actually address the question of what the world is, and how it works. Reality is transcendental. It cannot be understood without addressing its transcendental nature.

Among the fundamental questions which lie at the heart of ancient philosophy are: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ And: ‘Is reality itself one, or many? If it is one, how is there a multiplicity of things in the world?’ Another question, which is addressed, but not answered by Plato: ‘If this world is not reality itself, is it a copy? And if it is a copy, is reality now two, and therefore not itself?’ The whole agenda of ancient philosophy is addressed by the following question: ‘If this world is not reality itself (and clearly it is not), what is it that we experience, and why?’

Thomas Yaeger, December 30, 2018.

Unwritten Doctrine, Ancient Silence

[This is an extract from  'Unwritten Doctrine, Ancient Silence',  one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

Plato was quite explicit in the Timaeus that it was not possible to tell all men about ‘the Father of the Gods’. It follows from this that if, as in Plato’s case, doctrine comes from an understanding of the divine, then there must be an unwritten doctrine beneath the written texts which contains at least what makes sense to Plato himself, and perhaps an inner circle of peers or advanced students.*[1]

It is often assumed by students of antiquity that there is no special importance to be attached to remarks that certain items of information are to be kept secret and not imparted to the unworthy, and to the ordinary mortal. This assumption is based on the presumption that there was, and is not, anything about which it is impossible to speak of, before those not used to dealing with information about religion and the divine. This is a curiosity of modern times, in that the ignorance of theology among the moderns makes it impossible for them to credit the importance of theology in antiquity -  both to those who understood its subtleties and and those who didn’t.

In other words, it is assumed that what is proclaimed secret is not something which, within the culture in question, must necessarily remain secret (otherwise dire consequences might follow), but is something local to a particular cult or religion, and is an artificially created object of mystification, created for the benefit of the cult, to increase the aura of that cult, and to promote its ideology.

There is another possibility which should be considered, if only to clear up the scope of the phenomena we are looking at: if the priests in antiquity proclaimed that the secrets pertaining to the gods should necessarily remain secret, what might be the nature of such secrets?

Naturally it is not being suggested that all religious structures and institutions in antiquity would subscribe to what we might call ‘rational circumspection’ and a necessary element of secrecy. But it is important to explore the possibility that sometimes, and perhaps for the most part, as it might turn out if we look closely enough, these structures and institutions had what they understood as very good reasons for this way of operating. It is too easy to write off this aspect of ancient life on the grounds that of course they would say this kind of thing about themselves and their institution even if there were no rationality at all in the practice. Certainly ancient religious belief was as subject to political manipulation and machination as in the modern world, but it does not follow that there was nothing more substantial to the religions of the ancient world than a purely ideological tool for a power elite who believed in absolutely nothing (though it might be perfectly fair to suggest that modern power elites believe in nothing but power itself). 

If we presume the  ancients did not believe in the rational sense of their religion and their cultic practices, at least at some level, then a whole raft of other questions would need to be answered, We would have no way, for example, of fathoming why the story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in order to gain a fair wind for Troy, was credible to an ancient audience, and made some kind of sense.

Clearly the truth is likely to lie somewhere in between the two extremes of belief and disbelief in the tenets and imperatives of ancient religion. But if we do not explore belief and its reasons in antiquity, we can never know detail of the level of rationality in ancient religion. This is not a problem, if, as is implicit in many modern studies of ancient religion, we assume that religion is at root an irrational response to the complexity of both nature and human society. The argument that there may be a rational component in ancient religions therefore can be understood as an attempt to elucidate the extent to which this might be true, and to challenge the conventional view that there is nothing of  the sort to be found there.

Plutarch gives some interesting information about Alexander’s intellectual background in his account of Alexanders career. He wrote that: ‘It would appear that Alexander received from [Aristotle] not only his doctrines of Morals, and of Politics, but also something of those more abstruse and profound theories which these philosophers, by the very names they gave them, professed to reserve for oral communication to the initiated, and did not allow many to become acquainted with. For when he was in Asia, and heard Aristotle had published some treatises of that kind, he wrote to him, using very plain language to him in behalf of philosophy, the following letter’:

Alexander to Aristotle greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel in others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.*[2]

This is generally taken to be a reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. However at the time Plutarch was writing, perhaps the late 1^st century C.E., or the early 2^nd century,  it is likely that Aristotle’s Metaphysics had not surfaced as a published work. *[3] It is unlikely on this account to be a genuine letter. Nevertheless, the passage reflects the ancient perception of an agrapha, an unwritten and orally communicated doctrine underlying the public work of both Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Plato’s Academy.

What could possibly be of such importance to withhold, and from whom? The story of the prisoners in the Cave in the Republic of Plato gives the general outline of the problem. The simile involves a group of men whose only means of apprehending reality in a darkened cave is the shadows of things cast on the wall by the flames of a fire. For these men, there is no other reality. Were they to become aware of the fact that they were not seeing real objects, but only shadowy two-dimensional representations of real objects, this would cause them to have to restructure their picture of reality. The problem would be so much worse if they were released from the cave into the sunlight. Plato invokes the strength of the sun’s light as part of the simile, and suggests that the prisoners would have to look at the image of the sun via darkened pools of water, before attempting to gaze on the light of the sun directly (as if one would ever want to advise this).

In the story of the Cave, the sun is the image of the Good, the Form of Forms, and the ultimate source of all representation and experienced reality. Plato, by means of the story of the Cave and its inhabitants, is illustrating his view that reality is an extremely complex phenomenon, and that it cannot be understood easily without preparation. Were the complexity of reality, or rather its understanding, to be introduced baldly to men unprepared for what they were about to hear and see, they would be unable to comprehend it for what it was, and might attack those who were leading them out of the Cave into the sunlight.*[4]

Anyone who has explained technical or abstract information - which is to some extent counterintuitive in nature - to someone who has a narrow and concrete understanding of the world and its parts, will understand something of the problem which Plato is addressing here. Explaining to an untutored musician that (for example) the modern piano keyboard has actually been detuned to make the full range of polyphonic composition possible, is likely to produce an adverse reaction, despite the fact that it is quite true. The reaction is likely to  be complete disbelief, so used have we become to the tuning of the equal-temperament keyboard.

This of course is a relatively trivial example. The Good in the writings of Plato is a transcendent concept, beyond any earthly exemplar, and extremely difficult to communicate even to an educated and informed audience. Plato is clearly signalling that, beyond the simple difficultly of explaining the nature of reality to those who, for whatever reason, have been brought up with a weak and threadbare account of it, there is a necessary and unavoidable difficulty in understanding the concept of the Good and that the difficulty inheres in the nature of the Good.

The Good, as defined in the work of Plato, is taken to be Plato’s own conception. Clearly it has something to do with the nature of the divine, though Plato is often read as if he is speaking purely philosophically, whatever that might mean in the context of ancient Greece. The Good is, as Plato discussed the concept, not something which we expect to find in earlier contexts. The remark of Christ in the Gospels that none should be called ‘Good,’ but God is of course made several centuries later, and in a milieu where Greek philosophy was familiar, *[5] but when, in the book of Genesis, God looked upon his handiwork at the end of the first week of creation, ‘he saw that it was good.’*[6] Genesis represents a redaction of earlier texts, probably compiled in the fifth century B.C.E., in the time of the Persian domination of the near East. Scholars blink at this reference, and do not see what is there in the text.*[7] No rational philosophical concept is involved.

The only public lecture Plato ever gave was on ‘the Good’. It was not a great popular success, and treated the subject in such a mathematical way that the audience had great difficulty in understanding what he was talking about.*[8] We might be on the right track by suspecting that Plato had no intention of being understood by the bulk of his audience, and that the matter of his talk was not intended for the ears of the multitude, in the same way that, contrary to popular opinion, the public utterances of Christ as reported in the Gospels were not intended to be understood to those who did not have the ‘ears to hear’. 

As already mentioned, Plato explicitly said in the Timaeus that it would be impossible to explain the ‘Father of the Gods’ to men. This was partly for the reason that the transcendent nature of the divine is beyond our capacity to put adequately into words, but also because, as illustrated in the story of the Cave in the Republic, the uninitiated individuals who cannot apprehend the nature of the Good directly live in a world of phantoms and illusions. Their reason is necessarily clouded because of that fact, since it must be impossible to come to sound judgements on the basis of a procession of phantoms bearing no constructive and causal relationships with one another. 

So Plato’s attitude to the ordinary citizens of Attica, of Greece, and of the wider world, was dismissive: they had no constructive contribution to make to the elucidation of the nature of reality, and it would be hazardous to give them details of the nature of the Good, since there could be no way of predicting what they would do with that information. They might even wish to imprison or kill those who might be foolish enough to wish to release them from their prison world of dreams and false opinion.

We know that secrecy was an important part of Greek cult, though much of religious life in Greece seems very open in comparison with other parts of the ancient world. Exclusion was an important aspect of religious practice in Greece as it was anywhere else – certain groups would not be allowed to attend religious worship, or at certain times, just as in Attica certain groups were excluded from participation in the political life of the polis. Yet the rites of the Olympian Gods have not come down to us, which makes discussion of Greek religious life very difficult for scholars, who are reduced to talking in the most general terms about the meaning of the Olympians to the Greeks. We do know about civic responsibilities in connection with the cults of the Gods, often from later periods than the classical, and from Greek cities in Anatolia during Hellenistic times, in the form of liturgies which had to be paid for by prominent individuals within the community, in order to cement their participation in both the cult and the life of the city. 

From the point of view of a purely sociological analysis of ancient Greek culture, this information is perhaps more valuable that the detail of the liturgies themselves – however here we are looking at the ideas which form the basis of religious life. We do have hymns to the gods which were an important part of ritual in the mystery cults. These mostly come from Roman Egypt, and have late features, as might be expected. But otherwise they tell us something of the likely importance of a wide range of Gods in cults which were well established in the early history of Greece, say from the time of Pythagoras to Herodotus. 

Pythagoras’ own doctrines were taught as part of the life of an exclusive cult, and Herodotus mentions various cults in the course of his history. However, each time he makes reference to an important piece of cultic practice of some significance for his narrative, he makes it clear that he is not divulging that practice in the text, but is relying on the reader (or listener, if the text was being read in public, as it seems to have been at the time of its composition). He says something like: ‘those who are familiar with the mysteries of the Kaberoi at Samothrace will know what I mean’. This is of course extremely annoying for modern scholars, who at one and the same time know that there is some interesting reference being made, and that they have no idea what it is. So there is (or rather was), an esoteric reading of the text possible, as opposed to the surface reading which we now have to make, except in the rare cases where we can supply the deficiency.

Clearly the esoteric reading of the Histories of Herodotus made sense to his readers, and made the work richer in antiquity than it is now.

If we move forward in time to the neo-Platonist Porphyry, who was a pupil of Plotinus, and look at his work on the images of the Gods, we can see that the same imperative of secrecy operates. Porphyry uses the conceit of a discourse within the precincts of a temple, in order to explain something of the import of images within a sacred context. Those who have only profane knowledge are asked to leave, which says loud and clear that there is another level of understanding, a sacred understanding of religious imagery beyond that available in the world of common opinion.*[9] Of course Porphyry is delivering this imaginary discourse in the form of a written text, which is not subject to the kind of restrictions possible in the context of a guarded temple. So Porphyry’s text has to do two things at once: it has to reveal and not reveal at the same time. Going back briefly to the supposed letter from Alexander to Aristotle, found in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, it is interesting to read Aristotle’s supposed answer to Alexander, in which he defended his action in publishing the esoteric doctrines of the Lyceum in the full light of day by saying precisely that they were ‘published, but not published.’ In other words, Aristotle was claiming (in Plutarch’s text) that though the text of the Metaphysics or whichever work it was) contained information relating to the esoteric doctrines of the Lyceum, communicated formerly in person to Aristotle’s pupils, it did not publish the doctrines in a form in which they were to be properly understood.

The question might be asked in that case (if this exchange of letters was real, rather than being a way in which Plutarch could make clear his attitude to the nature of Aristotle’s Lyceum, and a supposed esoteric level of Alexander’s imperial mission), why were the doctrines published at all? The same question might be asked of Plato’s writings, since he makes it very clear within the corpus that the invention of writing as a means of communicating important information was a great disaster, since formerly memory had been cultivated, and memory was of great importance to the understanding of the world.

Our natural response to esoteric levels of meaning is, in the absence of clear and overt information about these levels of meaning, to pass over these levels as absent, and of no consequence to us and our understanding. Both Plato and Aristotle published their texts as an aide-memoires of sorts,*[10] principally for those who already had an understanding of the doctrines being alluded to in the course of Aristotle’s text.  We do not have this kind of intimate association with the doctrines at the heart of these texts, and so it would seem to be utterly impossible to penetrate whatever these doctrines might be. *[11]

....

[End of extract]

---

[1] That Plato had an unwritten doctrine is not itself an unusual view among Plato scholars – over the past hundred years a large proportion have taken this view – Paul Shorey being an example. However reasons for holding that Plato had an unwritten doctrine vary. Mostly the view arises because otherwise it is difficult to find coherence in the Platonic corpus. So the idea of an agrapha arises as something which contains the missing pieces in the structure.

[2] Plutarch Lives: Alexander.

[3] There is an excellent account of the progress toward publication of Aristotle’s manuscripts in the Penguin edition of his Nicomachean Ethics. Like almost all of Aristotle’s works which we possess, this work appears to be constructed out of notes made by Aristotle himself, or by his students. At least one passage in the Nicomachean Ethics clearly duplicates the content of another, if not in the same words, which suggests strongly an imperfect collation of notes by several hands by a student editor.

[4] This is a clear allusion to the fate of Plato’s teacher Socrates, who was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens.

[5] Christ may allude to the story of Socrates and the cup of Hemlock in the Gospel of John.

[6] Book of Genesis.

[7] Of course the determinant of what meaning is intended by the reference to what is Good is the context. And the context of a creation by the separation of waters and the creation of a vault of heaven does not immediately suggest the presence of a philosophical level.  Near eastern kingship employed both the concept of the Good in terms of a final cause with which the King sought to be identified, and the mastery of the forces of chaos and order, symbolised by the disposition of the waters of the Apsu.

[8] Cherniss, Harold.

[9] Though there are important differences in the doctrines of Plato and the neo-Platonists which it is important to observe in discussion, both Plato and the neo-Platonists were at one with respect to the idea that understanding was a property of the divine, and that lesser mortals, the uninitiated and merely common, were lesser beings precisely because of their greater distance from understanding.

[10] Plato’s account of the importance of memory makes it clear that any unwritten doctrine would be unlikely to be committed to writing, and therefore written documents must make sense as allusive texts.

[11] The Cambridge History of Early Medieval Philosophy mentions this difficulty, referring particularly to the works of the Neoplatonists. The presence of an esoteric background is acknowledged, but since there seems to be no way in to this background in the absence of a key, the only course of action is to evaluate the material in terms of the surface text. A.C. Lloyd, The Cambridge History of Early Medieval Philosophy.

........

Justice and the Harmony of the Soul

Justice is spoken of in Plato's Republic as one of the four

 cardinal virtues; the others being wisdom, courage and 

self discipline (prudence; temperance or moderation in 

older translations) [428e]. Justice however, proves to be

 more difficult to define than the other virtues for the 

participants in the discussion, and they find that its definition 

cannot be approached directly. Therefore they decide to define 

the other virtues first, in the hope that what is left over 

will prove to be justice. 

After the other virtues have been defined, the participants

find that justice remains elusive. Socrates suggests a 

change of approach, and gains the agreement of 

Adeimantus and Glaucon that justice may be characteristic 

of both individuals and communities, and since

 communities are larger than individuals, justice may be 

easier to discern in the context of the polis "We may 

therefore find justice on a larger scale in the

larger entity, and so easier to recognize. I accordingly

 propose that we start our inquiry with the community, 

and then proceed to the individual and see if we can find 

in the conformation of the smaller entity anything similar 

to what we have found in the larger" [Rep. 368e-369a].

Socrates discusses the origin of the state (the polis) and

 argues that it arises out of need, because individuals are not

 self-sufficient. The basic needs are food, shelter and

clothing, and the creation of the polis supplies these needs.

 Such basic needs, he argues, are best met by the individuals

who make up the polis pursuing their own natural 

aptitudes, which are different for each and fit them for 

different jobs[369b-370b]. Hence Socrates argues that 

"we do better toexercise one skill" rather than attempting 

to practice several. Further, the workman must be able to 

function at the right moment for action and thus 

"a professional at the call of his job will not wait till he has 

leisure to spare for it" [370c]. The division of labour within 

the structure of the polis means that both the quality of the 

work done and the quantity produced are greater if 

individuals specialize in this way "on a single job for which 

he is naturally fitted, and neglects all others", whether he 

be a craftsman or a businessman.

Where then is justice in the state? Adeimantus suggests that

it is to be found somewhere in the mutual relationship of the

various elements which make up the state [372a]. The state is

not wise, for example, because of the knowledge of its

 carpenters concerning woodworking and the excellences of that

 craft [428a], no matter how vital the craft may be to life:

this kind of knowledge is too specific in its nature. Socrates

 asks whether there is 

"any form of knowledge to be found among

any of the citizens in the state... which is exercised not on

behalf on any particular interest but on behalf of the city as a whole, 

in such a way to benefit the state both in its

internal and external relations?" [428c] 

The answer is that there is, and it is possessed by the guardians, 

the class of citizens whose special purpose it is to defend the polis

(other men cannot do this and pursue their own natural

 abilities). These men, as citizens, are wise and capable of

being just in the abstract, rather than in the particular.

That is, it is possible for individual souls to be just, as

well as a community. The implication seems to be that they

 have some important feature in common which makes them just;

but what justice is, remains elusive, until Socrates remarks

that:

"our quarry is lurking right under our feet all the time

and we haven't seen it... like people searching for

 something they have in their hands all the time" [432d].

He suggests that it is in fact the requirement laid down at

the beginning of the discussion, that "one man was to do one

job, the job he was naturally most suited for" [433a]; and

that it is the quality left over, after discipline, courage

and wisdom have been identified, which "makes it possible for

them to come into being in our state and preserves them by its

continued presence when they have done so" [433b]. 

He argues that the duty of the ruler is to administer justice, 

and that to do this they will "follow the principle that men 

should not take other people's belongings or be deprived of 

their own... their reason... being that it is ”just" [433e]. 

Injustice is therefore defined as the opposite of the pursuit 

of special excellences, so that someone attempting to move 

from one of the three principal classes in the polis to another, 

say from the class of artisans to the military class, by means of

wealth or physical strength, is attempting to enter a sphere

for which he is unfit; the same is true if the individual

 attempts to pursue several or all functions simultaneously.

 Socrates claims that "this sort of mutual interchange and

interference spells destruction to our state" [434a-b]; and

 describes such a state of affairs as "the worst of evils".

This then, is the soul writ large, and justice, having been

 defined in the state as the mutual relations of its various

elements, each pursuing its own special exellence and

 occupying its particular place within the social structure,

 must, if the individual is to be just, involve a similar

structure and set of relationships within the soul. 

Thus Socrates argues that there are three principal aspects of the

soul: the Reason, the Spirit, and the Appetite, corresponding

respectively to the three principal classes in the state,

 which are: the Guardians, the military class, and the class of

artisans and businessmen. Thus the whole structure of the state 

is tied in closely with the ‘Myth of the Cave’ and the ‘Simile

 of the Sun’, as well as the matter of the ‘Divided Line’, 

discussed later in the Republic. 

The first and third of these correspondences are fairly easy to 

understand, but the middle of the three is a different and difficult 

matter, and Plato himself is unclear about it, though he warns us 

that his method is not to be regarded as precise  Each of these

 aspects of the soul must follow its own interests, like the

various classes within the state. Justice is concerned,

"not with external actions, but with a man's inward self,

 his true concern and interest. The just man will not

allow the three elements... to trespass on each other's

 functions or interfere with each other, but, by keeping

all three in tune, like the notes of a scale... will in

the truest sense set his house to rights, attain self-mastery 

and order, and live on good terms with himself" [443c-e].

The just individual has become one instead of many and "will

be ready for action of any kind (recalling the workman

 pursuing his special excellence)... and will call the

knowledge which controls such action wisdom."  Injustice is

action which destroys this disposition and capacity, and 

opinions, as opposed to knowledge and wisdom, which 

control such action, are defined as ignorance [443e]:

"Injustice is a kind of civil war between these… three elements... when

the elements of the mind are confused and displaced... [this] 

constitutes injustice, indiscipline, cowardice,

ignorance, and, in short, wickedness of all kinds" [444b-c].

The relations of the parts of the soul, whether harmonious or

inharmonious, is further compared with the physical health of 

the body: health being defined as being produced by  

establishing a natural relation of control and subordination

among the constituents of the body, whereas disease is 

produced through the establishment of anun-natural 

relation [444d].

The question remains to be asked: if all these elements 

are to be bound together in harmony, how is this achieved

 by letting each constituent of the soul or state pursue its 

own special xcellence, its function?

 It seems to us a very laissez faire

arrangement, and clearly the polis is some kind of entity

beyond the mere assemblage of its parts. It would not do, for

example, for the entire body of the citizenry to consist of

 carpenters, no matter how great their skills, no matter how

 excellent their designs. Likewise, a polis full of Guardians

would have difficulty in supplying the needs of the citizenry

in respect of food, clothing and shelter. Clearly Plato

 assumes that a proper order, a proportionate order of the

classes of the citizens, is natural. I.e., that it is in the

nature of reality for separate things to be joined together in

 a proportionate way. It would seem that the way this

harmonious arrangement arises is by each of the elements of

 the whole pursuing its own special excellence, but it is not

 altogether obvious why this should work out properly.

The reason for the difficulty here is that we look at things

 upside down with respect to the Greek perception of reality.

 Assuming (as we tend to do) that reality is an aggregation of

elements which add up to make substance and action, we cannot

 easily understand how it is that order has a natural place 

in the resulting arrangements. But the Greeks thought (with the

exception of materialists like Democritus) teleologically, so

 that the universe (in toto) was thought of as complete and

 perfect in itself. 

What we encounter in our experience is this complete and 

perfect totality unwound and disassembled to

 various degrees, so that things are not present in the proper

 proportions and order. However, if things are brought to their

proper ends, to their own perfection and completion, then, on

the basis of the analogy with the cosmos at large, all the parts

 of that individual entity, that particular whole, must

be present in a proper and harmonious order (which echoes the

 character of the argument about the nature of the soul on the

basis of the larger entity of the polis). 

Thus it is that the pursuit of special excellences by individuals, 

in terms of skills, and moral and intellectual virtue,

without reference to the activities of other individuals, was 

understood to  result in such a harmonious arrangement. 

They are joined together as a consequence of the fact that each 

of the virtues is complete and perfected,  and thus each 

participates in the completion and perfection of, the individual, 

the polis, and ultimately the cosmos itself.*1 

*1 See Timaeus 31c-32c.

References:

Plato: The Republic (penguin edn. transl. and introduction by

 Desmond Lee)

Plato: The Timaeus (penguin edn. transl. and introduction by

 Desmond Lee)

Onians, R.B:  The Origins of European Thought

The Platonic Theory of Being

[This is an extract from the chapter 'The Platonic Theory of Being', published in The Sacred History of Being on November 2, 2015]

.....The context of this passage is an attempt to explain water and air as intermediary between fire and earth, but what Plato is giving us is more general: a theory of participation which has been the root of the western tradition in art and architecture ever since:

For whenever the middle term of any three numbers, cubic or square, is such that as the first term is to it, so is it to the last term - and again, conversely, as the last term is to the middle, so is the middle to the first.

- then the middle term becomes in turn the first and the last, while the first and last become in turn middle terms, and the necessary consequence will be that all the terms are interchangeable, and being interchangeable they all form a unity.  [i]

Why is it a necessary consequence that all the terms are interchangeable? Each of the terms bears a relation to the others, a proportionate similitude, and each can become first, middle and last terms in an extended sequence, but they are not the same as each other. They are conjoined with one another, but in sequence. They bear likeness to each other in the proper sequential order but not otherwise. It depends on the arrangement. Given the proper arrangement, one may pass through the sequence and establish degrees of similitude between all the different terms. But they are still not the same. They participate in each other, but their proportionate similitude is not identity, and that is essentially what Plato is claiming here.

I think that there is no doubt that this is what Plato means, and it is up to us to explain it. Clearly it underpins the description of the activity of the philosopher in the Republic, where it is said that the process of argument:

...treats assumptions not as principles, but as assumptions in the true sense, that is, as starting points and steps in the ascent to something which involves no assumption and is the first principle of everything; when it has grasped that principle it can again descend, by keeping to the consequences that follow from it, to a conclusion. The whole procedure involves nothing in the sensible world but moves solely through forms to forms, and finishes with forms.  [ii]

What Plato is arguing is that, by systematic dialectical enquiry, we can rise from the realms of likelihood and opinion, where we encounter only similitudes, to the realm in which certain knowledge is possible. This is to be achieved by passing through the similitudes, on account of their similitude, to their ultimate origin, the Form of the Good.

In a sense the Platonic dialogues can be understood in this way - as excursions from selected assumptions - and the Republic and the Timaeus illustrate this very well - both employ series of images, of likelihoods which are to be understood as metaphors or similitudes of the general notion which is to be grasped. We are to reject the accounts of the making of the universe in the Timaeus, on the grounds that these accounts possess merely likelihood, and no more. The general notion or the ultimate reality behind the accounts is not to be grasped by collation of the versions, but by an altogether more mysterious process of induction....

[End of chapter extract]

---

[i] Tim 31c-32a

[ii] Rep. 511b-c