now we want to look more systematically at Plato's ethics having laid the overall foundations but first I want to backtrack in time for a moment and say a few words about Socrates views on ethics now Socrates as I said was Plato's teacher he developed certain ethical views of his own rather generalized and it's still very important they were subsequently taken up and developed by Plato and in a different way also by Aristotle now I will not give you a full presentation of Socrates views this evening I'll concentrate for the most part only on those which
are essentially valid mentioning an occasional error but not focusing on it Socrates was a champion as I mentioned last week of an absolute objective Universal code of ethical principles he was an arch opponent of the Sophists he believed that ethics was a science not a matter of feelings and impulses now he never worked out a full system of ethics but he had leads to perhaps his most important lead was the parallel he was fond of drawing between the soul and the body now consider for a moment the body it obviously has a definite nature and
there are therefore definite conditions that have to be fulfilled to keep it healthy and there are definite two Sciences whose function is to determine those conditions there is in the Greek world gymnastics the method of taking care of and exercising the body to keep it healthy and medicine the method of curing its various ailments now there are certain options you can do sit-ups or push-ups for instance or eat one kind of food with so on so many vitamins or another kind which has the same number there are options but the principles of bodily care are
mandatory and not optional if you disobey them you have a diseased sick body and of course notice certain things may give you temporary pleasure for instance dope or poison but there is nevertheless an objective basis for declaring that these things are wrong because they subvert the life of the destroy his body the result is that after a few flickers of pleasure we have the ravaged dope addict the alcoholic with DTS etc the general rule is definite physical conditions University have to be met to achieve physical health and therefore true bodily welfare and this requires you
to tend your body scientifically to exercise reason and self-control as against acting on any women urge you get now for Socrates and he was the first really to emphasize this the same is true of the soul now by the soul we mean here in the context of Socrates the psychological or spiritual element in man the soul has a definite nature and there are definite conditions required for it to be healthy the universal conditions derived from the nature of the soul in modern terms we don't talk about an unhealthy soul but we recognize the phenomenon he
was referring to we talked about a tortured in erotic he's psychotic a man who has anxious guilty depressed self doubtful torn by conflict that said well that's what Socrates would call a sick soul and you must live a certain way if you are to have a healthy soul as proved by the fact that there are such things as six souls you have to live virtuously now you must understand what the Greeks mean by virtue they use it simply to mean excellent performance of function whatever the function happens to be if the function of a knife
is to cut then a sharp knife is a virtuous knife it's a knife which is has the virtue or power of being able to perform its function a virtuous man therefore is a man who performs his function correctly and looks after his soul according the actual you mustn't associate virtue as used by any of the Greeks with the meaning it came to have under Christianity virtue the actual word that we use is the same root as virility and vir is of course Latin for man now it is as someone once pointed out it's a fascinating
commentary on the development of civilization that the word virtue passed from meaning a manliness and a man to chastity and the woman that is the legacy of Christianity in any event ethics for Socrates is the science of achieving health in the soul it is on the level of the soul what gymnastics and medicine is on the level of the body and therefore there are objective absolute principles of ethics just as there are in the case of the body if you follow them you will achieve happiness but Socrates insists and Plato and Aristotle agree with them
that there are therefore definite conditions imposed by human nature for the achievement of happiness it is not they all insist a matter of acting on any desire you happen to have happiness has objective universal conditions now of course today it's bromide the people can achieve happiness any way they choose and it's arbitrary a subjective etcetera but of course the Greeks are right not the Sophists Peaks but the main line from Socrates on our right in this viewpoint it is not true that the way to achieve happiness is to have any arbitrary desire and then simply
satisfy the proof of that is endless without the right psychological conditions you can have a passion for money and acquire it and end up a miserable Park Avenue neurotic or a passion for fame an acquired and end up a movie star on a Beverly Hills couch in psychotherapy forever or a passion for love and acquired and end up one of those self doubting the erotics who feels that he's a fraud and worthless and the love simply makes him feel worse Socrates is right misery is the consequence of a disease or unvirtuous or unjust soul so
he along with the Greeks in general demand proof when you say about a man he's happy they take that as an achievement because it means he is a completely moral man they do not sling the term happiness the way the moderns do and therefore if somebody tells three jokes at a party and gets roaring drunk they do not say he is happy they say he is having a temporary titillation and they clearly distinguish there's two different Greek words one meaning pleasure one meaning happiness pleasure is head on eight from which we get hedonism and happiness
is eudaimonia which is the much broader term encompassing the whole condition of the soul now it follows from Socrates view that no man can really be harmed by anybody else and he says this because in the basic sense the crucial determinant of his soul and of his state is up to him how he conducts himself nobody can make you unhappy in this fundamental sense now here we must distinguish as he did between what we can call inner and outer happiness the external condition is how people treat you and your inner state now Socrates for instance
as Plato depicts him as a man of inner tranquility peace of mind serenity he has a healthy soul now if true other people can defame him rob him even kill him but in this deep sense they cannot get to him they can't destroy his inner serenity and conversely they cannot give you happiness in any basic sense they can give you money fame love etc but not the inner harmony or health which makes them enjoyable now I should say ideally for the Greeks it's nice to have both the inner and the elder but the crucial thing
is the inner because that's what determines your whole direction the crucial thing is to have a healthy soul not just life but the good life never to commit injustice no matter what never to commit evil because evil is like poison in a literal sense it brings only suffering and self-destruction in its wake that's the substance of the socratic contribution to ethics now there's one more crucial Socratic point and that is that virtue requires knowledge in the same way that medicine or architecture or any practical art requires knowledge is a very common device for Socrates to
draw a parallel between the various practical arts and ethics the art of living it requires knowledge knowledge of the proper end and of the means to it and thus Socrates famous principal virtue is knowledge virtue is knowledge now what exactly did he mean by virtue is not as far as we can judge he meant two quite different things one of them I would say correct the other false both package deal together in this famous statement the first is that knowledge is a necessary condition of virtue knowledge of course of what is required for the health
of the soul and here isn't obviously correct and there's an exact parallel for instance to architecture if you don't have any knowledge you will not be able to build sensibly its let me be a matter of chance and you're building 9/10 and will topple if you even get it up and the same thing for Socrates is true of the art of living if you do not know the principles by which to live you simply are gonna have a life which collapses instead of a building that's part point one under virtue is knowledge apparently however Socrates
also believed a second point under this formula namely that knowledge is a sufficient condition of virtue in other words that if you know what is right you will automatically unnecessarily do it you have no choice about it there is no such thing as deliberate evil simply ignorance now how did he claim to prove that knowledge is all that's required and itself guarantees virtue well his argument is like this he says virtue rather everyone necessarily pursues that which he thinks is going to lead to his own welfare to his self-interest to his own good to his
happiness now I should say here an explanation of this view of his that Socrates along with most of the Greeks assumed simply without question that of course all men are egoist to want to achieve their own happiness this is wrong bata is simply as an evidence of the fact of the comparative health of the Greek culture now if you combine that premise with Socrates definition of virtue namely that which is indispensable to a man's welfare the conclusion follows unavoidably that everyone who knows what virtue is and sees that it leads to as welfare will necessarily
pursue it and live the good life because the only alternative would be he's deliberately and willfully pursuing his own destruction and of course according to the Greeks that is impossible therefore said Socrates everyone who doesn't live the good life does not know the nature and rewards virtue sin is simply ignorance there's no such thing as a willful evil once you know the good you cannot betray it all wrongdoing is involuntary unless you see the urgent importance of studying philosophy for Socrates it gives you the knowledge that makes you good and therefore makes you healthy and
therefore makes you happy the study of philosophy is therefore the key the only key to a successful life now I have to literally in a few sentences demur from this last element of the virtuous knowledge near the idea that it is sufficient of itself to guarantee virtue it has had a very negative very bad effect this latter view because the effect has been to wipe out the distinction between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality there is no such thing as volitionally immoral behavior on this view simply involuntary ignorant and today of course there's all
sorts of people exonerating are trying to exonerate all sorts of crimes on the grounds of well he couldn't help but he wasn't educated he didn't know any better if he'd had the right knowledge he would have been ok you're familiar with that now of all the possible criticisms you could make of this view I'll confine myself to two very briefly it assumes first of all as I mentioned that all men are irrational egoist acting always for what they believe will be their own welfare something would just simply demonstrably false anyone who knew the history of
Christianity which of course Socrates didn't have the chance to know one see that and I don't mean to pick just on Christianity atheists are no better and you can just look around the state of the world every any newspaper as far as this point of school sir to become a rational egoist is an achievement not an innate endowment human beings are not determined and of course this would be a version of determinism Socrates you they're not determined in irrational rational egoistic or not egoistic there are men who are actually indifferent to their own personal lives
and Happiness there are men if you go by the facts who are positively eager to destroy themselves to sacrifice themselves Socrates error is to project onto human nature the general Pro reason healthy egoism of the Greek civilization it is a noble error but it is an error and another criticism the fact that do you know something does not mean that you will automatically apply that knowledge you can know that something is good for you and yet refused to allow that knowledge to come into focus the point I give students in school which is the perfect
example of this is you know there's going to be an exam tomorrow you have the capacity simply to push that unpleasant fact out of your mind by an act of evasion and go out of focus now you see Socrates implies here once you know your knowledge must always be operative but if you understand the Objectivist theory of free will which I wouldn't here attempt to go into essential to free will is that you not only have to know you have to summon your knowledge and concentrate on in any given situation by consistent acts of focusing
this is what Socrates leaves out so it is right that when you know that something is the correct thing and when you volitionally focus on that fact keep it real to yourself then and in that moment you have no choice but to act on watch as you know but it doesn't follow that whenever you commit a wrong action you didn't have the knowledge it could very well have been the case that you had the knowledge but chose to evade it that's inherent in free will you can never become an automatically good person just by stuffing
yourself full of enough lectures on ethics well so much for Socrates views you see that apart from certain errors his general view is sound if undeveloped and generalized it's true that man has in nature using his terms the soul has a nature it's true that happiness depends on having a healthy soul living in accordance with your nature that sophistic when worshipping is a means to guarantee misery and it's to the knowledge of man's nature and requirements as indispensable to virtue and happiness but we don't yet have anything very specific we have to know well what
is the specific nature of man or the soul what are its requirements what are the laws of happiness what is the knowledge we need and thus we have to turn to Plato to fill in socrates generalized scheme and deduce a concrete set of virtues from it and first what then is Plato's view of the nature of man the nature of the soul and thus you can title this if you're taking notes Plato's psychology now that does not meet the workings of his mind it means his theory of the nature of the soul and nature of
man it's you hey psy CAG is the Greek for soul and therefore psychology is literally theory of the soul you can think of it a theory of the personality theory of the spiritual psychological component of men now to understand Plato's like college you need to remember his metaphysics there is a sharp dualism between the world of perfect forms and the world of Heraklion particulates now according to Plato man is a creature who has ties to both worlds he is a composite creature of two parts soul and body his soul or this reason belongs to another
world it came from there it's non material it's essential function is to study the forms but in this life the soul is encased in the body and as a result man has drives urges desires that a disembodied soul would never have he has loves lusts for physical things in a word there is a part of man which urges him up to the world of forms to study to think to philosophize and there is a part which pulls him down to this world the part influenced by the body and therefore there must be two parts to
man's personality or two parts to the soul if you like to call it that reflecting the two different worlds man for Plato is a dualistic creature he has a higher nature and a lower nature almond he is a higher nature is his reason or call it his mind the thinking part the part that studies the forms and acquires knowledge his lower nature is the irrational element in him and that is the emotions the feelings those says Plato are always feelings and emotions for things in this world for the sensible world and notice you do not
feel passions for abstract forms emotions and desires are inherently this worldly they're directed to particulates you may feel a craving lust for bananas but nobody feels a lustful banana hood you see so on this point he's right emotions are directed to particulate now these two elements according to Plato present in every man they are fundamentally independent of each other and in fact opposed components making up the essence of man's soul now notice they are opposed by nature what is the proof of that well it's what you could call the argument from conflict which Plato puts
forth in the Republican which has been going like a house of fire ever since it's perhaps best illustrated by the story of Philip and Mildred in our Human Bondage the mostly lost illustrating the eternal conflict between man's reasons and his passions if you know that story which I certainly don't propose to tell now except in one sentence it amounts to he Philip is an artist and he meets Mildred a green tinted from the gutter who intellectually speaking he finds repulsive and yet he has caught in a helpless emotional bondage to her on the other hand
he means Nora a nice girl he intellectually approves of and he's completely indifferent to her sexually emotionally and he runs through the book wailing about the eternal plight of man his emotions pull of one way and his reason the other now there's 10,000 such examples of the followers of Plato has have written and I don't have to multiply them plato's argument is if a man like this is urged in two opposite directions at the same time there must be two different opposite parts at work two independent autonomous motivating sources one pushing one way and one
the other now you see here the influence of Plato's metaphysics because if you held a one reality metaphysics you would never come to such a conclusion you could easily account for conflicts without taking emotions as irrational elements severed from reason and functioning independently you would do it by reference to contradictory ideas contradictory premises which a person holds and you would say the person holds a contradiction he is an intellectual conflict and one half is usually not within his conscious awareness but in principle if he introspect properly engages in self analysis perhaps goes to psychotherapy he
will be able to come bring it all to the surface get away did the contradiction restore harmony to his emotional life and proceed about his business but if you come to man in advance within metaphysics of dualism and conflict you will find that conflict in man also and for Plato therefore in every man's soul there is a basic conflict of reason versus emotion it's a little bit more complicated because Plato proceeds to subdivide the lower emotional element itself into two parts ending up with three two plus one using the lowest element of the low part
it calls the appetites and those are the desires grossly crudely tied to the physical world the desires were physical things like food shelter wealth money sex then there is the higher part of the lower part if you follow that and it's more or less intermediate he calls it the spirit tad element te D not the spiritual because they're all spiritual in the sense of versus physical but the spirit ed the spirited element and it is in effect a passional more violent part of your emotional life the part that is a little higher than the appetite
so quite a bit higher than the appetite because it's not directly tied to physical things but it's still oriented in this world so of course there's nothing like the high part it's responsible essentially for intense anger indignation ambition hatred the desire for power honor glory now if you ask why he made this latter sub division between the appetites and the spirited it is the same argument from conflict he observed in a man's sexual desire can point in one direction and the man can feel violent anger at his own sexual desire in which case his indignation
his spirited element is aligning itself with his reason let us say and both of them are against his appetite on the other hand the spirited can jump in the other direction it's let us be calls a balance of power in the soul and if the voice of reason says you shouldn't have that particular desire and the spirited element chimes in with hatred for a reason and lends its way to the appetites on top of it well then the man is pretty much cooked you see so the spirit it is like an intermediary part that can
go either way now you see here the obvious influence Pythagoras remember the three men at the Olympic Games the lover of gain the lover of glory and fame and the spectator well that has now been blown up you see into a full-fledged theory of human psychology Plato's own analogy and analogy it is that inside the skin of every man there are three creatures a little man and that represents the reason a raging lion and that represents the spirited and a many headed slobbering drooling beasts and that represents the appetites now those of you familiar with
Freud will see that there is a close correlation between Plato's trichotomy here and Freud's at least the heed of Freud is simply plato's appetites put into Latin and Plato himself took the view that the appetites contained among their other parts such evil desires that they come out only in dreams that we can't face them in real life now I hasten to add in defense of Plato that Freud is a 19th century irrationalist and that that by comparison plato's trichotomy is a paragon of virtue in relation to the Freudian corruption if you're interested to know why
I say that I'll discuss that in the question period if you want the upshot in any event is that for Plato there is a tripartite soul three-part three autonomous separate distinct of independent sources of behavior three springs of action in men so that man is inherently metaphysically by nature in conflict his parts are inherently at war with one another that's human nature that is not neurosis now it is this psychological theory that sets the problem of ethics and the problem is in effect how to achieve peace and harmony among these parts health of the soul
for Plato will equal in effect peaceful coexistence among the man the lion and the many headed beast ethics as the science cuz it's gonna tell us how to do it how should you live how will you achieve harmony of the soul and therefore happiness well Plato says the answer lies in the fact that each of these three parts of the soul has a specific function a specific job to do a specific purpose to serve in the organism as a whole if we grasp the function of each that will guide us as to how to use
each properly the function of reason is obviously to acquire knowledge of the world of forms and on the basis of this knowledge to rule the other parts of the personality and therefore to guide man's life the spirited and the appetite of element of course are blind they respectively simply roar and rule it is only reason that can see the consequences of an action the conditions of a goal it can plan long range and it must therefore be a reason that is ruling now when a man's reason has acquired the knowledge and is ruling his life
demand as a whole says Plato has the virtue of wisdom I might mention here as background that the Greeks recognized four cardinal virtues the conventional Greeks you know in the way in which today are the Christian civilization you say the main virtues are faith hope and charity well in Greece the standings for them the conventional virtues were wisdom courage temperance and justice it was a better civilization while Plato is going to show how he can accommodate the standard for according to his particular scheme now the spirited element what is its function well essentially it is
the executive element of the personality it's the part that incites you to action Plato holds that disembodied reason itself would merely contemplate motionlessly never do anything he says no man would ever act simply out of his theoretical intellectual conclusions and therefore in his view the spirited or passionate element is required to get a man moving doing something on the basis of his rational conclusions it's the thing that gives you the drive the energy the enthusiasm to go out into the world and fight for your values rather than merely sit back and contemplate those now its
proper function of course is to let itself be guided by a reason so it will act only for value sanctioned by reason and will fight in battles only approved by reason in other words it has to align itself on the side of reason and if so says Plato the man as a whole will have divert you of courage now he calls it courage because he thinks of the spirited element as functioning most obviously in military campaigns when a soldier is guided by reason he will know exactly how much to endure what to fear and what
not to fear he won't either route blindly taking foolish risks not knowing what he's doing or on the other hand turn yellow and turn tail and run when he should have stood his ground in such a case he'll be neither foolhardy nor cowardly he will be courageous and thus Plato gets the second virtue courage as to the appetite of element it essentially performs the life promoting functions essentially it's the concern for food sex material sustenance physical goods now this is the most dangerous element because there is a chronic tendency on the part of the beast
to spring there is a chronic temptation to start enjoying these pursuits as pleasures in themselves rather than merely as a means to promoting life and therefore the appetites come to dominate most men here again says Plato we must be guided by their function we must never indulge in them as ends in the cells we must willingly submit to the rule of reason we must to use Freudian terms keep the lid on the idiot and if you do this you have virtue number three temperance now temperance has used in Greece does not mean complete abstinence it
doesn't have the same meaning as the women's Christian Temperance Union but it's a little closer to that in Plato in particular because he's a Platon now assume that these three parts are acting properly as I've described each is doing its job we have in effect a psychological division of labor each is doing what it is suited for and not interfering with the others there is always we have an integrated harmonious personality and then says Plato the man as a whole has the virtue of justice he called injustice because the Greeks tended to think of justice
not as one virtue among others but as a synonym for virtue or good behavior in general on the other hand injustice or evil would be a lower part of the personality gaining control seizing the reins and growing cancerous lay out of all proportion so for instance Plato would say that Hitler represents a cancer of the spirited element the power luster you see or the Don Juan represents the cancer of the appetite of element and I might say Plato would equally say that an industrialist like Henry Ford senior represents a cancer of the appetite development virtue
and a word is cancer of some part of the soul spiritual improper growth and therefore Plato's final answer to the Sophists is why shouldn't you live this way the way this office say because you are killing yourself spiritually you are undermining your soul you are instituting a civil war which will lead to your destruction and here you see he has given a full account of Socrates view of the health of the soul he's now developed that view into a whole theory of what the soul is what parts it has and therefore how it should live
and he has done it by tying it to a whole overall metaphysical epistemological base and if you now ask Plato the question with which he began the Republic if you give a man the ring of guide geez how should he live when he can get away with murder if he wants Plato would say don't do it even if you could get away with it it isn't worth it because you are obviously destroying yourself in the process and notice there for that plato's answer to the Sophists amounts to this we have to turn away from the
concerns of life on earth we have to repress our passions and our appetites and concentrate on another super reality the choice these two schools offered you in effect is win worshiping subjectivism or otherworldly asceticism and that is the alternative they offer Plato does not say emotions are consequences of your premises and if your premises are rational your emotions will be rational and your personality stable and healthy he says emotions are served irrational elements waiting to spring up and seize control and a health consistent sitting on them and not letting them get too violent now the
effects of Plato's view of human nature and particularly of the nature and source of emotions are overwhelming on subsequent Western civilization I'll run through a few of the most blatantly obvious ones but you could give a five-hour lecture just on this point alone all of the following views are platonic in origin to begin with this implies a certain type of determinism because you have no control over the content of your emotions your likes or dislikes your feelings your passions they are independent of your thinking they are thrust on you by your body consequently you're helpless
to change your character if you happen to be born with strongly developed appetites you're simply stuck with that kind of soul there's nothing you can do and this for Plato becomes the basis as we'll see in a moment for the division of men into three types with innately different characters now I should mention that Plato hints at certain points that in the other world you had a choice about which soul you were gonna be born with you picked your soul so to speak at the last moment before you came back around the next time but
that doesn't do you much good in this world the second consequence since the passion is in general are bad since all men necessarily feel them to some extent there is an Achilles heel in human nature a fundamental weakness man has emotions therefore the ground is prepared for the theory of original sin for the theory that there's an inherent weakness deficiency evil built into male at birth now of course in Plato the metaphysical basis of this is the idea that anything in this world man or banana or is imperfect and therefore and semi-real and contradictory etc
and man therefore is imperfect to later of course in the theological period it was tricked up to be explained by Adams original sin but that simply is a mythological version of platonism third did you ever hear anybody say if you advocated to them to view that you should live entirely by reason oh well how would that be possible what about the emotional side of human nature if you ever heard that that is platonic the idea being emotions exist they are basically antithetical to reason and they demand some expression and therefore a completely rational man would
have to be a man without emotions which is impossible now I remember years ago having a conversation with the plateless and I was taking the view that you should always act by a reason and he said to me well this is obviously impossible suppose you had a girl in the car and you were driving at the top of a mount with a look at the moon now if you go by reason what would you do discuss astronomy with her now you see this is automatic platonism on his part he just routinely assumed that to be
rational means to have no feelings always to be impersonal etc reason is the anti feeling the anti emotional not just simply the scrupulous observance of facts without using emotions as evidence but the actual antithesis of emotion and then there for a reason requires the destruction of the emotions which since it can't be done then people can't live completely rational that platonic view is everywhere for there is the grading of careers depending upon which part of the soul is most involved now for instance businessmen industrialists producers come on as very low types of people on this
view as against philosophers or pure scientists pure as against you know the applied type or pure mathematicians notice the word pure is a platonic legacy they are uncorrupted you see by the crude physical concerns they're off according to this dichotomy in their own super dimension one of these is materialistic appetite of and therefore their action now of course that's all over the place that influences every variety of intellectual to take just a tiny example the theory that the great American self-made capitalists are robber barons now there's no evidence or documentation for such charges but the
historians who utter them and the people who accept them expect such tales to be true on philosophic grounds because they know that they are dealing by definition with the low depraved irrational type of man you see they know that from Plato and therefore of course what would you expect and therefore you don't have to scrutinize the evidence too carefully you just get the Ford Foundation to finance a grant and come out with a few smears and that's it now I should mention just for your own knowledge that Plato himself did not include artists in the
good side of this particular career dichotomy he had several reasons which I won't take the time to go into but later platon list included artists as being these spiritual as against the material side and they also were elevated into this higher category of course only so long as they're not popular because if they're popular and their works sell their commercial and that plunges them back down what's next five what about the attitude to money and wealth what about the idea the love of money is the root of all evil Jerez Plato's description of how the
true philosopher lives his life none of them none of the true philosophers must possess any private property beyond the barest necessaries you see private property materialistic next no one is to have any dwelling or a storehouse that is not open for all to enter it will their food they will get in the quantities required by men of temperance and courage and their wages fixed so that there will be just enough for the year with nothing left over and they will have meals in common and all live together like soldiers in a camp gold and silver
we shall tell them they will not need having the divine counterparts of these metals always in their souls as a god-given possession whose purity it is not lawful to sully by the acquisition of that mortal dross current among mankind which has been the occasion of so many unholy deeds they alone of all the citizens are forbidden to touch and handle silver or gold or to come under the same roof with them or wear them as ornaments or drink from vessels made of them this manner of life will be their salvation what is Plano zero sinks
well I've alluded to it before but I read you one brief passage another discussion quote is excessive pleasure excessive pleasure not compatible with tempers answer how can it be when it unsettles the mind no less than pain is it compatible with virtue in general certainly not it has more to do with insolence and profligacy yes and is there any pleasure you can name that is greater and keener than sexual pleasure the answer no nor any that is more like frenzy whereas love rightfully is such a passion as beauty combined with the noble and harmonious character
they inspire in a temperate and cultivated mind it must therefore be kept from all contact with licentiousness and frenzy and where a passion of this rightful sort exists the lover and his beloved must have nothing to do with the pleasure in question answer certainly not Socrates it appears then that in this Commonwealth we are founding you will have a law to the effect that a lover may seek the company of his beloved I should interrupt to say that this is written in the discussion of homosexual love but the principles are more broadly applicable a lover
may seek the company of his beloved and with his consent in kiss and embrace him like a son with honorable intent but must never be suspected of any further familiarity on paying of being thought on pain of being thought ill-bred and without any delicacy of feeling answer I quite agree unquote now let me say a word here once we're on love on what is platonic love now you might think from the passage I just wrote you but according to Plato the thing to do is to love your beloved soul or character even if not as
body well that isn't Plato was very explicit on this though even the soul is too tied to this world in another dialogue of his the symposium that's the famous dialogue on platonic love Plato gives you instruction on how true love should operate on platonic love the idea is you start with loving the body that's the lowest kind of love loving somebody's body then you proceed to love his soul or hers and then you go to the next step and you come to recognize that after all what you love in the body or the soul is
its beauty and that the same beauty is common to a great many other things the beauty of works of art the beauty of scientific discoveries the beauty of political laws the song and so ultimately you see that the thing that you love is beauty as such the form of beauty not its particular embodiment platonic love therefore technically is the love of the form of beauty and since the form of beauty is for all practical purposes the same as the form of the good it's the same as love of the form of the good it is
a completely otherworldly love and as is popularly understood the phrase platonic love is much too earthly for Plato the idea that you should love only the soul you see we have another ladder an amatory ladder all of Plato's philosophy is a series of ladders in metaphysics we have the ladder of being from images to the half real physical things to the lower forms to the good in epistemology we have a ladder of cognition from imagining to belief to thinking to true knowledge in now we have a ladder of love from a particular body to a
particular soul to a whole bunch of concrete instances of beauty wherever they may be found to the form of itself and just as the senses awaken us in us the remembrance of the forms that we had in a previous life similarly the perception of physical beauty which excites sexual desire also revising the soul the memory of the perfect beauty that it contemplated in a former existence and once you recollect this beauty that inspires in you a yearning for the higher life associated with the world of forms and therefore sexual love and the yearning for the
form of beauty really derive from one basic impulse but the trouble is says Plato that most men settle for the lowest crudest most vulgar form of its satisfaction namely sex or most personal love of other individual human beings whereas properly their love should be for the ineffable pinnacle of the world of forms which of course later became the view that the supreme virtue is love of God please explain in more detail the parallels between the platonic and the Freudian theories of personality and the nature of the Objectivist objections to the Freudian constructions and I had
many questions on this well you could give a whole lecture on that but I'll give a minute and a half in essence the difference is this they're north of course wrong but it's a big difference in the nature of the errors for Plato this supreme element of the three is reason now granted that he ultimately defines reason and mystical terms nevertheless it's them you mind the thinking fact only the part that judges and comes to conclusions and that to some extent uses logic at least on the lower stages for Freud reason is demoted to the
middle level of the Trinity it is the essentially the ego it has exclusively a mediating function between two alternatives so far from being the ruler of the personality as in Plato it is just a little helpless puppet shunted back and forth between the other two so that is a profoundly more and irrational view and in addition what is the nature of the third element in Freud Plato at least has two emotional elements both of which represent you your emotions and one rational element so to that extent is a certain individualism about it it's all parts
of you Freud however has the edge which is your patter your innate depraved passions the ego which is essentially your thinking reasoning faculty and is super-ego which is the mores of society which you have interjected and made a part of you in other words for Freud your basic conflict does not even involve reality or reason not even mystically conceived the conflict is not as in Plato between passion and reason but between arbitrary passion arbitrary society between feeling and people with reality dropped out of the picture all together now this is an infinitely more corrupt trichotomy
it could not have been formulated until the 19th century after Conte would have been impossible philosophically before reality was pushed out of the picture altogether by cotton as to the nature of the Objectivist objections to Freudian constructions well I wouldn't even know where to start the first thing is it's all constructions in other words arbitrary baseless senseless ungrounded irrational dogma made up as he went along with him actual observational evidence twisted to support the most bizarre theories eat of his complex at the death instinct etc it is of course completely deterministic an objective ISM objects
on that ground insofar as it advocates instinct which is essential to it it is a plank misrepresents the theory of innate ideas since in fact all drives to action presuppose knowledge or awareness any such theory as innate motivation or innate drives means innate ideas and therefore those are just a couple of obvious things on the face of it but I my actual feeling with regard to Freud is what I would say if someone said to me what is your objection of Santa Claus and my answer to that would be of course Santa Claus is much
more benevolent figure but my answer - that would be what is your reason in favor of the onus of proof is on demand who asserts that something exists and until such evidence comes up it's a philosophic mistake to dignify it by treating it sufficiently seriously to try to refute it if you will have a basically appetite of saul is it possible for you to succeed in your in converting yourself to a moral life or are you doomed in effect to immorality by the nature of your soul now that's a good question and Plato I would
think would inclined to answer it both yes and no yes from the point of view that he does not feature the deterministic element implicit in his philosophy he wants to suggest that men are really free and that they're responsible for what they are but no in the sense that he does believe you have an innate character and as apart from the state molding you there's nothing you can do about it so he like the whole of Western religion that grew out of him has an effective one foot in the freewill camp and one foot in
the determinist camp and you'll see that pattern repeatedly throughout religion on the one hand for instance Adam had to have free will because otherwise it makes a mockery of God's punishing him for his original sin on the other hand God is all-powerful according to Christianity and actually determined everything that happens and therefore he himself is the cause of Adam's sin and therefore of course Adam had no choice and Christianity juggles those two desperately with every possible device to try to make sense of it and of course can't
