The Allegory of the Cave

     In the Republic, Plato says there are three parts of the soul: the rational, spirited, and appetitive. He explains that the rational part of the soul represents the highest form of human capability, and he uses the Allegory of the Cave to illustrate how one comes to develop it in its fullness. Plato’s Allegory serves to illustrate how one comes to fully develop one’s intelligence, which is in alignment with the rational part of the soul.
    In the cave, prisoners are bound and permitted to only see the shadows projected on the wall before them, cast by the light of the fire shining on puppets. In the cave, the chained prisoners represent the starting point of mankind’s mind. They are only able to perceive illusions that are a crude reflection of what is real. A prisoner is loosed from his binds to see the puppets that the shadows are cast from and the fire that illuminates them. The freed man is then forced out of the cave into the light of the sun, where he will begin to see shadows and reflections of objects, then gradually as his eyes become fully adjusted he will perceive the objects themselves. Only a few will escape to see the visible realm and see the fire and objects casting the shadows, but they will lack the knowledge to explain what they now see. Eventually he will be compelled to look at the sun and recognize it as the source of illumination of everything he sees. Here everything is illuminated and represents knowledge and understanding. The last thing seen is the sun, which is the ultimate good; it is the source of light and all things that can be known in the intelligible realm. If The Good is the source of illumination of intelligence, then it is necessary to seek the things beyond the cave in order to develop the rational part of the soul. It is in the intelligible realm and knowing the Good that man reaches his highest possibility.

The Sophists

     This post covering the sophists is a little late. Frankly, I spent so most of my time reviewing Prodicus for this particular set of pages, so I had done mostly a cursory reading of the other three. So after listening to the presentations over Protagoras, Gorgias, and Hippias and having some time to think about it… Who am I kidding? Even after thinking about it I can’t get them to fit under a nice category of unifying thoughts and ideas. I suppose I should have seen that coming though, since while researching Prodicus, I found out about the sophists belonged to no organization, shared no common body of beliefs and founded no schools.

     So who exactly were the sophists? Simply put, they were teachers. They would go around teaching their students (not without expecting proper payment from the students, of course) on just about any topic imaginable. Although they are well known for their rhetoric and being able to teach it. This plays into the purpose of what they were teaching. Possibly the greatest criticism against this group is that they were more interested in being right than in the truth. Granted, nearly everything that we know about them comes from Plato, who wasn’t their biggest fan, so the information we have about the sophists has an unfavorable tint. Although they did find themselves an important niche in society. There was a demand for higher education due to the growing wealth and intellectual pursuits. As politics grew, there was a need for the development of specialized techniques of persuasion and argument. Also, there were new questions (or the same old questions recurring) about morality, religion, and political conduct. The sophists both responded and contributed to these demands. Because the niche they were filling was so broad, each of the sophist contributed in their own way with topics that interested them, which I suppose is why there is so little unity in a common body of beliefs.

Tomorrow I will be giving a presentation on Prodicus, so this blog post will be dedicated to a quick recap of what I have found.

When I first started looking for information on Prodicus, most of the places that I started out looking had him slipped under and only talked about him in the context of the category of Sophists. So it seemed like a reasonable place to start was finding out more about the Sophists and who they were. The term came from the Greek word sophistēs, formed from the noun sophia, meaning ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning’. What did they do to warrant this title? In the fifth century BCE, they were educators who toured the Greek world offering instruction in a wide range of subjects, with emphasis on skill in public speaking and the successful conduct of life. Alright, now that we have a general idea of what Prodicus was up to, we can start looking at his life and how he fits under this category.

Prodicus was born in city of Iulis, in the island of Ceos, an Athenian colony off the coast of Attica east of Cape Sunium, and he lived approximately from 465 BC – c. 395 BC. He came to Athens quite a bit as an ambassador, and while he was in Athens he often taught rhetoric. He became wealthy from this occupation because he would have students pay him for the lessons. Prodicus' topics of instruction were rhetoric, the origins of religion, and ethics and virtue.

 

Several of Plato's dialogues focus upon Prodicus' linguistic theory, and his insistence upon the correct use of names. He specialized in the precise definition of words and subtle distinction between near synonyms, he paid special attention to the correct use of words and the distinction of expressions related in sense.

 

Concerning the origins of religion, he denied the reality of the gods and was called an atheist. Prodicus said the names of gods were originally applied either to things which are particularly important in human life, such as the sun, rivers, kinds of crops etc., or else to the people who had originally discovered things of that kind. He was understood as meaning that in fact Demeter is nothing but corn, Dionysus nothing but wine, and so on. He interpreted religion through the framework of naturalism and recognized a close connection between religion and agriculture.

In contrast to his radical views on religion, the moral stance expressed here is thoroughly conventional. All that has survived of his writings is a paraphrase by Xenophon (Memorabilia II.1.21–34) of his moral fable of the choice of Heracles between Virtue and Vice. A young Heracles about to enter adult life is met by two women at a cross-road. One calls herself Happiness (Eudaimonia), though she must admit her critics call her Vice (Kakia), who describes an effortless road of endless pleasure in this life. The other is called Virtue (Arètè), who describes a long road of hard labor in which man must earn what he wants through his efforts in order to truly enjoy it and thus deserve rewards from the gods in the afterlife.

Anaxagoras

Earlier this week I got ahead of myself and skipped a reading. Oops… So I’m going to backtrack and look at Anaxagoras.

Anaxagoras claims that all things are made from ingredients, or as phrased in our nifty Presocratics Reader, “homogeneous stuffs.” He explains how the ingredients function thus: “Anaxagoras says just the opposite of Empedocles about the elements. For Empedocles claims that fire and earth, and things of the same rank, are elements of bodies and that all things are compounded of them; but Anaxagoras says the opposite. For he claims that the homogeneous stuffs are elements—I mean, for instance, flesh and bone and each of the things of that sort—and that air and fire are mixtures of them and of all the other seeds; for each of them is a collection of all the invisible homogeneous stuffs.” Translation: everything is made up of ingredients that, when separated or brought together in different combinations, make up the perceivable world as we see it. Whereas Empedocles thought everything was made up of varying combinations of the four elements (fire, earth, water, and air), Anaxagoras claims that even those are formed by baser ingredients. I’ll borrow from the information in the introduction here, but apparently the Nous set forth and put in motion the original mixture of all the ingredients. From that point on, they are able to mix together to form the world as we see it.

The slip up I made with reading ahead actually worked out quite nicely, because I read Anaxagoras in the light of later theories. Leucippus and Democritus had their atomism theory that all things were made up of combinations of what they called atoms. I won’t make the automatic jump to say Leucippus and Democritus based their ideas directly off of Anaxagoras’ ingredients, but it’s interesting to see how a concept can change and develop from one philosopher to the next.

Leucippus & Democritus

I'm back!! It's funny how I take a one week break from writing for a busy week, and next thing I know it's several weeks later... 

Today's reading was about Leucippus and Democritus. A big chunk of the reading covered Leucippus' theory of atomism, which was continued by his pupil Democritus. I actually found it fascinating how their theory sounds very similar to things we talked about in my high school science courses. (You know, back when science was I thing I was required to take.) I could go on to talk about what they said about atomism, but it would be at risk of put putting on display my ignorance of anything science-y.

So instead I’ll skip to the very end. In aphorism number 54, it says “cheerfulness arises in people through moderation of enjoyment and due proportion in life. Deficiencies and excesses tend to change suddenly and give rise to large movements in the soul. Souls that undergo motions involving large intervals are neither steady nor cheerful…”  Upon reading that, I immediately thought of Aristotle when he says in the second book of Nicomachean Ethics “there are, then, three kinds of disposition: two are vices (one marked by excess and one by deficiency), and one, virtue, the mean.” Aristotle was looking at virtue as the true way to achieve eudaimonia (or happiness in the sense of well-being and flourishing). So it seems that Aristotle borrowed directly from Democritus (I’m assuming it was him) the idea that the extremes cause imbalance, so true happiness is found in moderation.

Pythagoras

Before I start, let's get this straight: I don't math. So I sat down my friend Clara, who happens to be majoring in the mathematical arts, and subjected her to a reading of the entire seven pages devoted to Pythagoras in our little book. This is what we came up with together.

Pythagoras wanted to be able to explain the entire world by rules that he could understand. He had such a mathematical mind that the method he used to make sense of it all was numbers. From there, he was able to apply it to life, nature, and the kosmos.

So we started with the last aphorism, the one with the lists that looked like a first grader's exercise in recognizing opposites. Pythagoras was so insistent in applying his "rules" to understanding the world, that he took the things that are confusing about human nature, picked them apart, and then defined them. In the words of my own math nerd, Clara, "we like concrete definitions, things that are true and solid." Well there you have it folks, it took math to get the ball rolling on the purpose of philosophy.

At this point another friend from the realm of math joined us to make sense of aphorism 18. We decided that, apparently, Pythagoras doesn't math either. On the advice of the math kids in the room, "he needs to define limited and unlimited and be clearer"... and "he can't just say stuff." Although it did end with the redeeming comment, "and numbers, as I have said, constitute the entire universe."

In conclusion, based on the number of characters and words, (which are even), I will receive an unlimited grade on this assignment. And then multiply it by 10, because apparently that is the perfect number.

Xenophanes

What I found most interesting about Xenophanes was his views of god. He starts by completely rejecting the traditionally acknowledged Olympian gods. Everything that everyone has grown up being taught about the gods depicted by Homer and Hesiod, Xenophanes discounts on the grounds that the poets “have ascribed to the gods all deeds which among men are matters of reproach and blame.” It makes sense—how is it that the divine, something that supposedly transcends worldly things, embodies all of the things that make man base? I think Xenophanes was on the right track here. He even continues to tear down these man-made gods by showing how the Olympians are only a reflection of men themselves; for instance, they were born, which means they had a beginning and thus there was a time in which they did not exist, and they had distinctly human characteristics and lead human-like lifestyles. If the gods that the Grecians were worshipping were merely reflections of themselves, then those same gods would be very different to other peoples to reflect their own life. If the gods are so fickle and mutable to the world around them, they don’t project a nature that transcends earthly things.

Thus far, Xenophanes has been doing all well and good in not going along with the popular views without thought, but he rejected them after pointing out the flaws. Then he looses me. He tore down the views of the gods of the poets, which he replaces with his own god, which lacks as much evidence as what he just denied. He says there is one greatest god, not like mortal in form or thought. The god is immutable and immovable, all seeing, hearing, and thinking, working all things through his mind. I’m not saying he’s wrong or right. He just lost me in the shift form needing evidence to ascribe to Homer and Hesiod’s depictions of the gods, to creating his own version of god without any evidence to support it.

Although on a side note, I think it’s interesting how man seems to intrinsically know there is something greater than himself. Xenophanes knew that the Olympian gods were no better in their exploits than man, and they didn’t adequately represent the higher things of this world. So instead, he grasped for whatever was in reach and fashioned his own idea of a god to try to fill the void.