The Anabaptist Jacques
Crusader
Merry Christmas.
This may seem a bit too early to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.
But I want everyone to know what I mean by that phrase.
I call myself a Platonist.
What that means is that I believe that Plato was right iin his description of the way things work, that is, his cosmic and what we
call spiritual view.
Years after Plato, a group of his followers made a religion, or at least a philosophical school out of his ideas.
They were called neo-Platonist.
They got a little too specific for my tastes, so I just go by my own interpretation of Plato.
The writing of Plato from which I adopted my views are Book VI and Book VII of The Republic.
Books here just means chapters.
The Republic, besides the Bible, is the most influential book in Western Civilization (although one philosopher puts Euclid first).
But the Republic was not its original name. Its original name was Padaei (I think that is the right spelling) which translates as
education and culture.
When the book was rediscovered during the Renaissance by the Italians, since their cities were republics they just called the book
The Republic.
Book VI gives Plato's view of the whole shebang. I want to make this understandable now, because this was once the most dominant
view held in Western Civilization and is still, unknowingly, the dominant view.
Book VI is written as a dialogue between Socrates and others. Plato uses Socrates as his voice in the book, but the ideas are
Plato's.
To explain his view, Socrates draws a vertical line in the sand with four intersecting lines crossing it horizontally.
This makes four sections.
Each side of the Vertical line represents something: The left side represents objects and the right side represents a person's
cognitive state.
The best way to explain this is to start at the bottom and work upwards.
The bottom left side, the objects, are shadows or images. For example, the shadow of your hand is what Plato would call an image.
The bottom right side, the corresponding cognitive state in order to understand the shadows is imagination.
This is not what we mean by imagination today, it is simply the ability to understand that the dark spot you see is a shadow of a hand, that is, understand
that it is an image of a hand.
The next level up are sensible things, that is, things you perceive with your senses, or what we call the real world as we see it.
The corresponding cognitive state to perceiving with your senses is trust. Your mind is trusting what it sees.
The next level up above the real world as we see it are mathematical objects. The idea is that the real world is a shadow of
mathematical forms just as the shadow was a shadow of the hand.
The corresponding cognitive state to mathematical objects is thought. Think about that!
Above mathematical objects are what Plato calls The Forms.
Plato's Forms are those things (Today we would call them Ideals rather than things) which are real and are the ideal state for a thing. For example, Beauty with a capital B.
The way it works is like this: Say we see a beautiful painting or a beautiful woman or a beautiful sunset.
What makes this beautiful to us is that it reminds us someway of the Ideal Beauty.
This is how, by the way, that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
There is something in the painting, or the woman, or the sunset that reminds us, that is, it is a shadow of the Ideal Beauty.
Now I said reminds us of the Ideal Beauty.
It is important to note that Plato believed that we are souls which continue through time and take on different human forms.
If I remember correctly this is in his dialogue called Phaedo.
Phaedo is just the name of the person with whom Socrates is having the dialogue. The strange names of most of his dialogues are just
that: it is the name of the person he is talking to---Crito, Eutypro, Meno, etc.
And just like Beauty with a capital B there is Justice with a capital J. That would be the Ideal Form of Justice which we tap iinto
when we feel something just was done or when we spot an injustice.
And the same for Truth with a capital T.
The corresponding cognitive state to understand and comprehend the Forms is Dialectic.
Dialectic is simply a question and an answer in the process of reasoning in order to understand things.
It makes intellection possible. And without intellection nothing can be understood about it.
So there is hope.
Now, above all that is what Plato calls the Idea of the Good.
Plato said that the Good was to the cosmos what the sun is to the earth. He makes that analogy in Book VII. The Idea of the Good was
the light of the world, so to speak.
All things come to be through the Logos.
Plato's followers would later use a term for The Good which they called Logos.
I hope I have explained this sufficiently.
But what is more important is that this idea is still very influencial in this day and age.
So much so that most of you who read this will be involved with something which directly stems from these ideas.
And that is explained in the following post.
The Anabaptist Jacques
This may seem a bit too early to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.
But I want everyone to know what I mean by that phrase.
I call myself a Platonist.
What that means is that I believe that Plato was right iin his description of the way things work, that is, his cosmic and what we
call spiritual view.
Years after Plato, a group of his followers made a religion, or at least a philosophical school out of his ideas.
They were called neo-Platonist.
They got a little too specific for my tastes, so I just go by my own interpretation of Plato.
The writing of Plato from which I adopted my views are Book VI and Book VII of The Republic.
Books here just means chapters.
The Republic, besides the Bible, is the most influential book in Western Civilization (although one philosopher puts Euclid first).
But the Republic was not its original name. Its original name was Padaei (I think that is the right spelling) which translates as
education and culture.
When the book was rediscovered during the Renaissance by the Italians, since their cities were republics they just called the book
The Republic.
Book VI gives Plato's view of the whole shebang. I want to make this understandable now, because this was once the most dominant
view held in Western Civilization and is still, unknowingly, the dominant view.
Book VI is written as a dialogue between Socrates and others. Plato uses Socrates as his voice in the book, but the ideas are
Plato's.
To explain his view, Socrates draws a vertical line in the sand with four intersecting lines crossing it horizontally.
This makes four sections.
Each side of the Vertical line represents something: The left side represents objects and the right side represents a person's
cognitive state.
The best way to explain this is to start at the bottom and work upwards.
The bottom left side, the objects, are shadows or images. For example, the shadow of your hand is what Plato would call an image.
The bottom right side, the corresponding cognitive state in order to understand the shadows is imagination.
This is not what we mean by imagination today, it is simply the ability to understand that the dark spot you see is a shadow of a hand, that is, understand
that it is an image of a hand.
The next level up are sensible things, that is, things you perceive with your senses, or what we call the real world as we see it.
The corresponding cognitive state to perceiving with your senses is trust. Your mind is trusting what it sees.
The next level up above the real world as we see it are mathematical objects. The idea is that the real world is a shadow of
mathematical forms just as the shadow was a shadow of the hand.
The corresponding cognitive state to mathematical objects is thought. Think about that!
Above mathematical objects are what Plato calls The Forms.
Plato's Forms are those things (Today we would call them Ideals rather than things) which are real and are the ideal state for a thing. For example, Beauty with a capital B.
The way it works is like this: Say we see a beautiful painting or a beautiful woman or a beautiful sunset.
What makes this beautiful to us is that it reminds us someway of the Ideal Beauty.
This is how, by the way, that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
There is something in the painting, or the woman, or the sunset that reminds us, that is, it is a shadow of the Ideal Beauty.
Now I said reminds us of the Ideal Beauty.
It is important to note that Plato believed that we are souls which continue through time and take on different human forms.
If I remember correctly this is in his dialogue called Phaedo.
Phaedo is just the name of the person with whom Socrates is having the dialogue. The strange names of most of his dialogues are just
that: it is the name of the person he is talking to---Crito, Eutypro, Meno, etc.
And just like Beauty with a capital B there is Justice with a capital J. That would be the Ideal Form of Justice which we tap iinto
when we feel something just was done or when we spot an injustice.
And the same for Truth with a capital T.
The corresponding cognitive state to understand and comprehend the Forms is Dialectic.
Dialectic is simply a question and an answer in the process of reasoning in order to understand things.
It makes intellection possible. And without intellection nothing can be understood about it.
So there is hope.
Now, above all that is what Plato calls the Idea of the Good.
Plato said that the Good was to the cosmos what the sun is to the earth. He makes that analogy in Book VII. The Idea of the Good was
the light of the world, so to speak.
All things come to be through the Logos.
Plato's followers would later use a term for The Good which they called Logos.
I hope I have explained this sufficiently.
But what is more important is that this idea is still very influencial in this day and age.
So much so that most of you who read this will be involved with something which directly stems from these ideas.
And that is explained in the following post.
The Anabaptist Jacques