The Puzzle of Ethics. Peter Vardy
is good could be settled by determining whether the action can be compared with or participates in the Form of the Good.
We live in a spatio-temporal world. The whole of our world is dominated by space and time. The Forms, however, are timeless, spaceless, changeless and immutable. Plato considered that matter, the raw chaotic ‘stuff’ of the universe, is everlasting – without beginning and without end. The Demiurge, Plato’s God, took this chaotic matter and moulded or formed it into the orderly universe that we know – using the Forms as a model. However the Universe is not perfect because the Demiurge had to work with pre-existent matter which resisted his will and also because the Universe is temporal and spatial.
The world, for Plato, is a dance of shadows – we live in the shadows brought on by time and space and our task as human beings is to see beyond these shadows. Plato puts forward three famous analogies which express this view – the Sun, the Twice Divided Line and the Cave. The last will be dealt with here although the first is also important and worthy of reference (see The Republic p. 274 Penguin edition):
Imagine an underground chamber, like a cave with an entrance open to the daylight and running a long way underground. In this cave are men who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs and necks being so fastened that they can only look ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Behind them and above them a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners runs a road, in front of which a curtain wall has been built, like the screen at puppet shows between the operators and their audience … Imagine further that there are men carrying all sorts of gear along behind the curtain wall, including figures of men and animals made of wood and stone and other materials, and that some of these men, as is natural, are talking and some not.
Socrates then says that the bound men would only see the shadows and they would assume that the shadows were the real thing and if the curtain wall reflected sound they would assume that the shadows were talking – in other words they would take the shadows to be real. Having established this scenario, Socrates continues:
Suppose one of (the men) were let loose, and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards the fire; all these actions would be painful and he would be too dazzled to see properly the objects of which he used to see the shadows. So if he was told that what he used to see was mere illusion and that he was now nearer reality and seeing more correctly, because he was turned towards objects which were more real … don’t you think he would be at a loss and think that what he used to see was more real than the objects now being pointed out to him?
Socrates’ point is that if someone looked directly at the light of the fire he would be even more dazzled than if he looked at the objects on the road between the fire and where he was bound. If he was then dragged out of the cave and saw the sun for the first time, he would be more dazzled still. In fact he would not initially be able to see anything of those things which he was now told were real. Gradually he might become accustomed to shadows outside the cave, then to other objects and finally he might be able to look at the Sun itself. The Sun stands for the Form of the Good – which is the highest of the Forms. Socrates’ point is that the philosopher is like the man who has been untied – it is a singularly painful process to be freed from the delusion of supposed reality, from the ‘dance of shadows’ that represents the world as it appears to us. It is a long and painful journey out of the cave of misunderstanding before one can begin to see reality as it is. Once someone has done this, then those things that passed for knowledge and were most prized by those tied in the cave would no longer be of any importance. As he puts it:
There was probably a certain amount of honour and glory to be won amongst the prisoners, and prizes for keen-sightedness for anyone who could remember the order or sequence among the passing shadows and to be best able to predict their future appearance. Will our released prisoner hanker after these prizes or envy their power or honour? Won’t he be more likely to feel, as Homer says, that he would far rather be a ‘serf in the house of some landless man’, or indeed anything else in the world, than live and think as they do?
The philosopher, then, is the person who has freed himself or been freed from the prison of appearance and has begun to see things as they really are. To such a person all the things that this world values so highly will be of no importance. If he or she tries to communicate them to others (who are still locked in the prison of the cave) the response will not be gratitude but rather anger or resentment. Most people will be content with the dance of shadows, they will be content with appearances and will reject the philosophic path.
Plato was preoccupied with the distinction between appearance and reality – reality is difficult to discern and one has to pierce through the shadows of appearance to arrive at the reality that lies beyond (C. S. Lewis sometimes talks in these terms and the title of the play Shadowlands about his relationship with his wife is based on essentially Platonic ideas). We can see from the parable of the Cave that Plato thinks the task of the individual is to leave the darkness of the cave represented by our ignorance and to come out into the light of the Sun – which represents the Form of the Good. The philosopher should be the person who has done this and who can see reality as it is.
iii) Justice and goodness
Socrates took a practical attitude to ethics – he was concerned with the question of how an individual should live in order to achieve happiness. Happiness is perhaps the best translation for the Greek word Socrates used which was eudaimonia but it is still inadequate as the Greek word has more to do with an individual having that which is desirable in the form of behaviour rather than simply living what he or she considers is a fulfilled life. Warm toes in front of the television screen is not an adequate understanding of eudaimonia! Indeed Plato and Socrates specifically reject the idea that ‘The Good’ can be defined in terms of pleasure. It is worth remembering that Socrates died for what he believed in which would scarcely fit with the conventional understanding of happiness.
For Plato, for a person to act justly means having the three parts of their personality in proper balance:
wisdom which comes from reason;
courage which comes from the spirited part of man and
self-control which rules the passions.
So a person cannot be just without being wise, brave and self-controlled – and only if this balance is maintained will a person be happy. Plato’s argument in favour of this last point rests on the claim that happiness depends on internal mental states. This seems an odd definition of justice (even from the individual’s point of view) as it defines justice in terms of a person’s mental states and not in terms of how we treat other people – although Plato would maintain that if the proper balance is maintained within each individual, then they would treat other people correctly.
Plato held that justice in the state mirrored justice in an individual (or, to put it another way, justice writ large in the state is analogous to justice writ small in the individual). In a just state the various parts co-operate harmoniously in their proper roles, just as, in an individual, the various faculties should also work together. The individual must rule himself, but state government is needed by properly trained philosopher-guardians, who are carefully educated and are not motivated by self-interest, to ensure that the proper balance essential to justice is maintained. If the majority of people live in the cave in the shadows of ignorance, they would not be in the best position to govern the state in the way it should be governed.
Plato was strongly opposed to democracy, as this gives power to the greatest number of people, because what the greatest number think may well not be correct. The mass of people are also easily swayed by rhetoric – as Socrates found to his cost when rhetoric persuaded the Athenian population to condemn him to death. Given the ease with which politicans and advertising can sway large groups of people today, Plato’s suspicion of democracy should, perhaps, be given more weight than it often is, although the dangers of those who think they know best and who decide to impose their will on others are probably greater than the dangers of democracy. However, Plato still provides a challenge to our accepted western liberal assumptions about government which is worthy of more consideration.
Plato’s approach is élitist