Plato

We saw the church in the Middle Ages and the monastic movement and so on try to deny all things physical. Where does that idea come from? It doesn't come from the Old Testament, where when God creates a physical world, what's His judgment on it?

It's good. But remember, in Plato's schema you have two worlds, the ideal world, the eternal world of ideas, and then this world. Ideas have consequences.

We've seen that all week and unfortunately, sometimes those ideas even creep into the church. I'm Nathan W Bingham and I'm glad you're joining us for the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Yesterday we met Socrates. Well, today we'll meet a famous student of his, Plato, who is considered one of the twin giants of Western philosophy. His influence has been significant, impacting the church of the Middle Ages and even some in the church today. So what did Plato teach? Here's R.C.

Sproul to explain. Almost 30 years ago, I had the opportunity to visit my older cousin, who is an Episcopalian priest of the Anglo-Catholic mode in Philadelphia. And this cousin of mine is very refined and cultured. He's a real student of the fine arts. And on that occasion, he took me downtown to Wanamaker's department store. Now, the purpose of that visit was not to make purchases, but because Wanamaker's was featuring a display of a famous painting by Rembrandt von Rhein. And the name of the painting is Aristotle, Contemplating the Bust of Homer. And so my highly refined cousin said to me as we approached the store, he said, boy, you're going to get an expansion of your understanding of beauty today, he said, cousin. He said, we're going to get to see that world-famous painting, Aristotle, Contemplating the Home of Buster.

Obviously, I haven't forgotten that slip of the tongue. But today we're going to contemplate a bust, but it's not the bust of Homer, it's the bust of Plato, because I've sort of wanted to have Plato come and visit us as we discuss some of his thinking. I was able to secure this bust recently in a trip to Italy in the coastal town of Amalfi, and I also purchased a bust of Alexander the Great, because I thought I shouldn't come home with just one because they tell me the two heads are better than one. But in any case, today we're going to be talking about my friend Plato, who along with his most famous student, Aristotle, are considered the real twin giants of Western philosophy. In fact, one historian of philosophy made the observation that all subsequent work in the field of philosophy by future generations and future philosophers is nothing more than footnotes added to the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, so prodigious were these men in their own day.

Now, I also noticed that I have a chair with me today, and it's not because I'm going to be lazy and sit down and give you a fireside chat, but there's a method to my madness, as I hope we will see in a few moments. The reason for this chair is really not for me to sit in, but to use as a prop to illustrate one of the most important principles of Plato's philosophy, but you're going to have to wait for that for a couple of moments. Plato was born in the year 427 BC, and you'll recall that's basically 28 years before the death of Socrates, which means that Plato was 28, the year that Socrates died. Plato wasn't his real name. Plato was his nickname, and it was a nickname given to him by his coach when he was a young gymnast and wrestler who wrestled in the games that were the precursors of what we now call the Olympic Games. But because of his powerful build, he was called Plato, which means broad shoulders, and that became his name by which we know him today. His personal family background was of high nobility.

His mother was a direct descendant of Solon, the great political thinker of ancient Athens, and his father was a descendant of one of the recent kings of Athens. So there was great loyalty and nobility in the blood of Plato, who was born into an aristocratic family. Now, he's known for being the founder of a very important school in Athens that is called the Academy, and the name Academy is drawn from the name of the person who presumably had owned a piece of property in the northwest quadrant right outside the city of Athens, a man by the name of Akademos. And he had some olive groves in this area and donated a parcel of this land so that Plato could start his school, and he honored Akademos by calling his school the Academy.

And it was situated in the midst of this grove of olive trees, and that's where we get the expression, the groves of academia that we still use to define the academic world in which we live today. Now, over the entrance to the school or the Academy, Plato had affixed on an arch over the door these words, let none but geometers enter here, sort of like Dante's sign over the door to Hades, despair of hope or abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Plato's sign read, let none but geometers enter here.

Now, wait a minute. We think of Plato as the great philosopher, not the great mathematician. Why would he call his school a school of geometry?

Well, in the first instance, Plato's school covered the whole scope of intellectual inquiry, from political theory to ethics to the sciences and so on. So it wasn't just a school for mathematicians, and yet he says, let none but geometers enter here. Now, to understand that, you can't think of it in terms of what we call modern geometry. The word geometry comes from the Greek word gase, or the word for earth, and the word, when we talk about metri or meter, we talk about that, which is a form of measurement. And so originally, the science of geometry was the science of measuring elements of the earth. And it was done by an examination of the forms of measurement, which we did study in modern geometry, like the triangle and the rectangle and the square and so on. And so by means of these various shapes or forms that we use to measure things mathematically, we call the science geometry. But Plato went a step beyond this by saying that the universe in which we live is not simply measured by forms, but rather the universe is forms, that reality is mathematical forms or ideas. At that point, we see something of the influence of the earlier Pythagoreans, who had a virtually mystical view of numbers.

But that's another story for another occasion. Plato's great contribution to the history of philosophy is in the development of what is called his theory of ideas, his theory of ideas, or it's sometimes called his theory of forms, his theory of forms. Now, Plato is what we call an idealist, or we could say that Plato more accurately is a realist. And you say, wait a minute, are you talking out of both sides of your mouth? How can he be both an idealist and a realist?

Well, let's think about that for a second. When we use the term idealist over against the term realist, what do we usually have in mind? We think of an idealist as somebody who's kind of Pollyannish, who lives in a make-believe world of ideals, who never comes to grip with the grim and harsh realities of the actual world in which we live in. And a realist is the one who draws his heroes, warts and all.

He doesn't try to give us a phantom image of ideal perfection. So for us, a realist stands in stark contrast to an idealist. But when we call Plato an idealist and a realist, we are using those terms in a significantly different way.

Let's see if I can explain that. Plato said that the ultimate reality, the ultimate realities, the ultimate realities I should say, plural, are ideas. The truth is ultimately formal, not material. That the ideas that we have in our minds of various things are a recall of ideas that actually exist in a spiritual realm, what we would call a supratemporal realm, a realm above and beyond this world of physical things that we perceive every day.

Now let me see in order to illustrate that the use of my prop that I brought here today. I'm going to ask for some help from our audience here to see if we can learn something about Plato's theory of ideas. I have my friend Roger, my super student, who sits here in the front row, and Roger never ceases to amaze me with his prodigious grasp of these difficult and complex ideas.

I'm not going to embarrass the adults by asking them questions that they'll stumble over. Instead, I will go to Roger because I know he'll be able to answer this question. The question I have for you, Roger, it's a very difficult question. You're going to have to think hard. I have this object in front of me.

What is it? A chair. All right, Roger, thank you.

You got it right on the button. He said, that's a chair. Now here's the question. How do you know it's a chair? How do you know it's a chair, Roger? You just grew up learning that that was a chair, right? You never saw that chair before today. What do you mean you grew up learning that that was a chair? But you came in here, you never saw that chair before in your life. And yet, as soon as I asked you what it was, what did you say?

No hesitation. It's a chair. How did you recognize it as a chair? It has four legs. All right, but you know, horses have four legs, don't they, Roger?

We're going to do this in the Socratic dialogue here. Horses have four legs, but you don't call them chairs, do you? All right, so there must be something else besides this having four legs that made you identify it as a chair.

What else? You can sit on it, but of course you can't sit on a horse, can you, Roger? Do you have anything at home that's kind of long, has like three sections to it, that has legs, four legs, and you can sit on it, call it a sofa? But you know the difference between a sofa and a chair, don't you? Yes, sir. We could pursue this a little bit further because have you ever seen chairs that don't look exactly like this, Roger?

Yes, sir. You've seen chairs that are upholstered and real comfortable, right? You've seen wooden chairs and soft chairs and hard chairs and all different kinds of chairs. In fact, every one of us has probably seen literally thousands of different kinds of chairs, right? Different shapes, different sizes, different material, and yet when we see these thousands of different particular objects, we can look at them, and in spite of the differences that are displayed among them, we still have this uncanny ability to put all of these particulars, all of these specific examples into the same category called chair.

All right? And so Plato would scratch his head and say, well, how can we do that? How is it that we have this ability as thinking creatures to recognize all these vastly different objects by the same common universal term called a chair? Or I look out here in the audience and I see people. I see young people and old people, male people and female people, thin people and heavy people, don't I?

Blue eyes and brown eyes. Every person in this room has their unique identification, and yet I can look at all of these particular examples of people and somehow extrapolate from and somehow extrapolate from these different individuals a class that we call human beings or people or mankind. Plato was once challenged to give a succinct definition for what it means to be human, and he said that a man or a human is a featherless biped, that is, a two-footed creature without feathers, until one of his students threw a plucked chicken over the wall of the academy with a sign around its neck that said, Plato's man.

It was a featherless biped. But in any case, what Plato was saying when he contemplated all of this is, how is it that we have this ability to recognize so many particular objects by this universal category of chairness? We have an idea in our mind of chairness.

We have an idea in our mind of clothes-ness. We have an idea in our minds of human-ness, of tree-ness, of street-ness. And so whenever we see a particular street or a particular tree or a particular man such as Plato, we can recognize them insofar as they approximate the idea of human-ness, tree-ness, chair-ness, street-ness, or whatever it is. Now Plato says the reason that is is that in this spiritual realm, there is the eternal perfect idea of tree.

There is the perfect eternal idea of chair. There is the perfect eternal idea of human. And everything that we meet in this world is simply a copy of the archetypal idea or ideal. Now what he's saying is that these ideas independently exist apart from us.

They have real being. Now do you see what Plato's getting at here is the old problem that was left unresolved between Parmenides and Heraclitus? How can we account for both being and becoming? This is the world, the world that we see and perceive with our senses, for Plato is the world of becoming. And the only way we can have any knowledge of this realm is because above this realm of becoming is the realm of being where the eternal ideas of things actually exist. Now let me just pause for a minute and say, do you see how he's called an idealist? He's called an idealist because he says that ultimate truth is found in these eternal ideas.

And it is the formal truth that is the highest truth. But the ideas for Plato are not merely constructs of the human mind. They're not just human ways of thinking about things, but these ideas really are. They have ontological status.

They have real being. And in that sense, he's called a realist because he believes that the ideas are not just imaginary, but they are real. Now do you see how he can be both a realist and an idealist?

Do you see how he can be both a realist and an idealist in the sense in which I'm using those terms at the same time? Now, one of the important aspects of this kind of thinking that has had a profound effect on every one of you and of your lives down to this very day. You live in a world, you grew up in an environment where you even now struggle with the idea that physical things—food, drink, sex, anything that is physical—sort of is infected by a shadow of evil. Even in the church, we saw the church in the Middle Ages and the monastic movement and so on try to deny all things physical, things of bodily appetites like hunger and drink, and that these participation in eating and in sex and in drinking were necessary, of course, for human survival and for the propagation of the species, but they were necessary evils. Where does that idea come from? It doesn't come from the Old Testament where when God creates a physical world, what's His judgment on it?

It's good. It can be misused, and there are evil uses of good things, but there's no inherent wickedness to the physical as far as the Bible is concerned. But remember, in Plato's schema, you have two worlds, the ideal world, the eternal world of ideas, and then this world where you have the particulars. Now, these particular objects, that we recognize as chairs, he calls receptacles.

A receptacle is something that receives and contains something. And for Plato, the receptacle is the particular object that copies to some degree the pure idea. But all receptacles, that is, all physical things, you, me, this chair, the tree, the street, anything that is physical is a receptacle, and anything that is a receptacle is, according to Plato, an imperfect copy of the spiritual ideal, so that by its necessary state of existence, anything physical is imperfect. Now, when he says imperfect, he means metaphysically imperfect, but it's a short step from metaphysical imperfection to moral imperfection, so that anything that is imperfect lacks pure goodness.

And from that, we get a whole history of philosophies that reject and deny the goodness of the created world. For example, in the Christian faith, as we will see in our next lecture, we believe in the resurrection of the body, that's part of our faith, the redemption of the body. For Plato, redemption comes when we get rid of the body. It's redemption from the body, when you're only really redeemed when you live in a pure state of spirit and of idea.

I'm sure you can see how that doesn't align with the biblical view of the body, and how helpful a series like this is to identify the errors and influences of philosophy and other ideologies. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul from his series, The Consequences of Ideas. This week, we have examined several problems that have been solved in this series, and we hope to see them in the future.

And that was R.C. Sproul from his series, The Consequences of Ideas. This week, we've examined several pre-Socratic philosophers, plus Socrates himself and one of his students, Plato. But this really is just the beginning, so I recommend that you request the entire series and also learn about Augustine, Aristotle, and some more modern thinkers. Today is the final day to request this special edition DVD set that also comes with lifetime digital access to all 35 messages and the study guide. So visit renewingyourmind.org or call us at 800 435 4343 with your donation of any amount, and take a journey through the history of human thought and the influences that these thinkers still have today. Only hours remain for this offer, so visit renewingyourmind.org while there's still time. The apostle Paul frequently referred to himself as being in Christ. Next week, Sinclair Ferguson will help us understand what that means, and the privilege it is that Christians are united to Christ. That's beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind. you