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Explaining Plato's Duality, Trinity,
October 2009, Updated
March 2010
A Form is essentially an immortal
truth. It is, if one likes, an individual God, below which mortal life
exists as an imperfect reflection. However, Plato does not equate it with
God itself. God is that first principle which all Forms have in common and
from which they derive. God or "The One" is the source, sometimes Plato describes it as The Good
or Beauty. The One is far more abstract than The World of Forms. Indeed it
is so remote, so simple, our comprehension of is extremely limited, and
Plato concentrates for the most part only on the easy to understand Form /
Reflection or Immortal / Mortal division. In fact the Theory of Forms is just one take on the most fundamental question of metaphysics: We clearly inhabit two worlds, the material world of sense perception, and an inner world of thoughts and ideas, what is the nature of them? By the sixth century BC the idea of two worlds is so firmly implanted in human consciousness that every major philosopher or prophet of the time, from Buddha to Zarathustra, espoused it. Even modern philosophy begins with an analysis of this duality. Descartes described thinking substance and matter but broke with the mysticism of Plato who claimed the superiority of the Form. Spinoza, Locke, Berkley, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel all worked on the problem. Neo-Platonist descriptions of the mystical connection between the Immortal and the Mortal world include "As Above, So Below", "As Within, So Without", "The Microcosm & Macrocosm" etc. The idea of a chair and a Chair Form is an interesting learning tool, but our real interest is in psychological concepts. A Chair Form, a Table Form, A Carpet Form also have us thinking about individuality, but in reality The World Of Form is a continuous sea. Neither does the two layer depth make much sense, above and below more accurately describe the relationship. The interconnectedness of The Immortal, psychology, fate and physical form is a vital feature of the connection principle which Plato frequently employs but does not properly justify. Carl Jung's synchronicity is another description of this principle of interconnectedness. Modern biologists analyse a cat by examining its physical properties, but Plato believed one could also consider it in another way entirely, perhaps as a collection of psychological forces, and he might draw conclusions by considering these forces in other contexts, a manner of thinking today regarded as deeply unscientific and speculative. Nevertheless, to some extent this is the essence of mysticism. The Duality Part of the brilliance of the discrete looking Theory of Forms is the construction of a clear duality between the Immortal and the Mortal Worlds. This is, in fact, the Yang / Yin or Male / Female or Active / Passive. Many readers will struggle to make the connection initially, and it is too difficult a subject for this quick article. Suffice it to quote from the commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus: "The divisions of male and female comprehends in itself all the plenitudes of the divine orders...". The male/female is not simply limited to human nature, it reflects the very structure of heaven and earth. The male-female nature is a microcosm of the relationship between the Immortal and Mortal. So Plato might have also deduced the duality by considering the male female directly, and we see this in his descriptions of men and boys which echoes the male/female (eg Phaedrus dialogue). Nevertheless, the beauty of the Immortal-Mortal relationship is its simplicity, it is far easier to analyse than the politically controversial and close to home Male-Female human nature. The male is form, the female is reflection. The male is abstract, the female practical. The male is single minded, the female is down to earth and multi tasking. The male is intellectual, the female is sympathetic. The male is idealistic and challenging, the female is nurturing and emotional. The male is power and reason, the female love and connection. Capitalism is male, socialism female. The male is authoritarian, the female democratic. The moral code of rationalist philosophers depends on their perspective. The Mortal Moral Perspective is the nurturing love of the mother. Justice is equality, utopia, cohesive. We have today's popular Christian morality. The Immortal Moral Perspective is the competitive father who forces his children to take risks and ranks their achievements. There is no equality nor cohesive utopia. Instead one is born the worm and, by challenge pain and brilliance, one ascends into the eagle capable of feeding on worms. Recall the genetic breeding viewpoint expressed in the Republic which is so offensive to modern Christian morality. For modern humanists (who have abandoned religion because God appears inconsistent with their passive feminine Christian morality) Plato & Nietzsche are evil or 'emotionally damaged'. But the passive viewpoint does not withstand reason. Does God care when humans die in a Tsunami any more than we humans care when we stand on a Cockroach? Out of the Mortal-Immortal Duality we get the concept of the Trinity and the four elements or Quaternity. The Duality was at the heart of early philosophical systems, but today very few understand it. The Trinity The immortal-mortal are opposites, that which they have in common is the intermediate spirit, together the three are called a Trinity. Plato's Republic includes some good descriptions of dualities and intermediates but the concept is made most clear in his Symposium and the extract which follows below is taken from this. The most important duality and trinity is Immortal World - Mortal World example which follows.
In Plato's Symposium Socrates asks Diotima
above love: "What then is Love?" I asked; "Is he mortal?" "No." "What then?"
"As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean
between the two."... "He is a great spirit and like all spirits he is intermediate
between the divine and the mortal... Now these spirits or intermediate
powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love...." "What is the use
of him to men?" asks Socrates. "That, Socrates," she replied, "I will
attempt to unfold..."... "When a man loves the beautiful, what does he
desire?" I answered her "That the beautiful may be his." "Still," she said,
"the answer suggests a further question: What is given by the possession of
beauty?"... "Happiness," I replied" "Yes," she said, "the happy are made
happy by the acquisition of good things. Nor is there any need to ask why a
man desires happiness; the answer is already final."... This desire is
common to all men... "Why, then," she rejoined, "are not all men,
Socrates, said to love, but only some them?"... Poets and Musicians are both
artists but we give them different names... Likewise the Love we speak of is
deeper than the human word... Beginning with lower arts of love Diptoma asks
Socrates: "See you not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their
desire of procreation, are in agony... but why should
animals have these passionate feelings? Can you tell me why?"... She
explains this instinct to procreate is an echo of the desire for personal
immortality and is the lowest form of the love which intermediates between
the mortal and immortal worlds... Then
she begins to describe higher forms of love... sexual desire for a specific
body, a body being the reflection of the immortal soul.... for many bodies... love of character instead of body,
character being a higher reflection of immortality than body... love of family... love of
education... love of achievement... fame... virtue... philosophy... However, love, as we normally comprehend the word, is clearly not the full story. There is another component, which we can perhaps label Reason. Man beholds the world of Form by reason and love. Reason is the +ve and love the -ve. Nevertheless don't think these are the only two intermediates - "Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love".
Plato lists three arguments against
democracy: the urge to power (sea captain with a crew of mutineers), the
wild animal trainer who slavishly feeds and works with the bestial nature,
and the corrupting influence of recognition and adulation (young man in
assembly being clapped). This trinity clearly follows the archetypal pattern. In Taoism we have the trinity Heaven-Earth-Man. Man is the intermediate, Yang is Heaven and Yin Earth. It's not as well thought out as Plato's Immortal-Mortal-Spirit but it's exactly the same concept. One of the nice points about Taoism is the continuous change between Yin and Yang and the blended nature of Mortal life, just as music is a blend of notes, an ever changing harmony and discord. Of course not every 'trio' fits into the trinity. Consider, for example, the concept of 3 Dimensional space. Unlike Newton's three laws, we clearly have three orthogonal concepts which do not fit this model. Nevertheless the Taoists believed essentially everything could be decomposed into Yin and Yang. I guess that space would be Yin and time Yang. However, the single designation of Yin and Yang is confusing, the relationship depends on the intermediate, so Yin and Yang have flavours. We started by deriving a duality from the Theory of Forms and then postulating Intermediates. It aided our understanding, but in reality we can not conceive of opposites except in a certain sense or intermediate. Really truth or wisdom was inherent in our definition developed earlier. If we changed that to causality we have the Immortal as the cause, the Mortal as the effect and we see the active / passive designation more clearly. In this time-space duality the intermediate is clearly not love nor reason, more likely some aspect of causality. The Quaternity The Immortal-Mortal Trinity is a duality of abstract and material combined with an intermediate force or spirit. We can further subdivide the opposites according to the flow of intermediate force between them - a sort of secondary application of cause and effect. Thus we have abstract-incoming, abstract-outgoing, material-incoming, material-outgoing. This divides our two world model into four. We have, in corresponding order, Air, Fire, Water, Earth. These are psychological elements, extensions to our Yin/Yang duality. An example of the quaternity is perhaps as follows: Microsoft must have vision, strategy, personality and execution.
An example: Jung speaks of the male anima, which is the feminine inner personality
present in the unconscious of the male, and the female animus, which is the
masculine in the female. The anima is feminine-introverted water the animus is
masculine-extroverted fire. Men can have
an uncomfortable shock realising how earth women are, and women a shock
realising how air men are. Why are masculine women stubborn? Their active
principle lacks detachment. Why are feminine men moody? Their passive
principle lacks practicality. In Kant's four fold reason we have Knowing, Willing, Being, Becoming. Henri Ellenberger, and perhaps Jung, believed the quaternity was a trinity with a forth attribute added, but I strongly disagree. I arrived at my conclusions by following Plato as carefully as possible, distinguishing between the opposites and the intermediate spirit (in the Symposium and Republic where the trinity is most clearly explained). From this concept of, opposites plus the essence that links them, the two step process naturally flows. The only alternative is Wolfgang Pauli's idea of constructing the quaternity from a pair of trinities. But this idea is not so far from mine - I split by the first essence and then split the two end points by another essence, so in a sense I also have two essential trinities. One good thing about the idea of repeated subdivision, rather than the Pauli description, is that you can easily imagine continuing the subdivision out past the four to eight, sixteen, etc. Each division is made along the same Yin/Yang like rules. Now we have the idea of a primal trinity dividing out into an infinitely complex web according to a perfect chain of logical subdivisions. This is kind of akin to the idea of Plato's form of the Good being the essence from which all other forms are derived. It gives us some conception of The One being the source from which everything branches.
The four can seem a much more useful
concept that the three. It has been said “All things do live in the three /
But in the four they merry be”. This makes sense because the three describes
the living system, but the four describes the practical state
of being. Now I will try to delve into the paths of reason and love in more detail by attempting to divide the intermediate of wisdom according to the quaternity. Reason-Air: We are talking of an attribute which connects us to God - a characteristic of enlightenment. For this we can examine Plato's descriptions of Socrates in the Symposium and other texts - Socrates is Plato's Christ / Buddha. Socrates is entirely uninterested in wine, sex, wealth etc and lives in purely philosophical world (eg Alcibiades, Symposium). Socrates' thought processes are characterised by such complete detachment that he sees and rejects the limiting nature of all tradition and human values. He is a mystic, but he can not be called religious, at least in the sense of believing in dogma. He is not a rebel who angrily adopts opposite positions, rather he transcends every position and ends in an almost childlike state of no belief. However, it is not a childlike state of non-understanding, he is regarded as the wisest man in Greece. His ability to see the truth, to behold beauty, leaves him in a state of permanent bliss. Reason-Fire: Socrates does not live a purely contemplative life. Socrates spends a great deal of time in discourse with other people and has developed a system of argument which is designed to impart his detached understanding to others. By argument he reduces the opinions of everyone he meets to absurdity. He is an ugly man physically, although strong and brave, and deeply challenging. He is a teacher, obsessed by his work, whose challenging technique demolishes the ego of his opponents lifting them toward wisdom. Socrates is profoundly idealistic, although for those on the receiving end, attached to cherished belief, he must appear tyrannical. His idealism is detached, he cares little for the present condition or happiness of his subjects, only for their betterment.
Love / Imitation: Although
Socrates is the wisest man in Greece he turns to the priestess Diotima to learn of love. "And now, taking my leave of you, I
would rehearse a tale of love which I heard from Diotima of Mantineia, a
woman wise in this and in many other kinds of knowledge, who in the days of
old, when the Athenians offered sacrifice before the coming of the plague,
delayed the disease ten years. She was my instructress in the art of love,
and I shall repeat to you what she said to me...". Ancient Greece was not
known for women's rights, and for Plato to choose a woman to teach Socrates
is seminal. Plato does not limit her understanding to love; he makes this
much clear here, also in the Republic he argues that women can perform any
task, even warfare. Plato's description of Diotima is sadly short and I am
still struggling to comprehend the concept. Nevertheless what follows are
some ideas: What did Socrates have that stood him apart from all humanity. Both exceptional Reason-Air and exceptional Love-Water. Why was Socrates a more famous philosopher than Diotima? Without Reason-Air Love-Water can be lost in a sea. Also, without a Reason-Air she can not communicate her revelations. By the way this concept of seeing or feeling is a vital one. Out of it we can derive aesthetics. So we have the feelings evoked in the individual as a result of beholding the synchronistic manifestation, or reflection, of underlying psychological essence, or form. Our appreciation depends on how harmonious the underlying form is with our personality, and the intensity with which the message is conveyed by the manifestation. For example, this is what generally drives our appreciation of man made objects and human bodies. We also have another effect on the individual evoked by the seeing facility which picks up on the divine complexity underlying the technical structure of the manifestation. It is hard for me to describe this, but it is a sense of uplifting wonder and clarity. It is why, for example, a close up of a snow flake is beautiful. It is why people are wrong to describe music as an emotional experience - it includes two experiential strands which we might label the emotional and mental. Some music famous for its mental component includes JS Bach's Harpsichord works. The Pentad The Pentad is simply the Quaternity plus the trinity. In other words it is no more complex than the distinction between the Trinity and Duality. A famous example is Kenneth Burke's act, scene; agent, agency; purpose. The act and scene are 'reflections', and agent and agency are 'forms'. Likewise these subdivide again, eg we have incoming agent, outgoing agency. Our purpose is that which binds the whole picture together - here the motivation between our initial division into our reflected effect and forming cause. It gets confusing because the distinction between the first set of subdivisions and the second set looks so similar even though they are actually orthogonal. Another famous example is the Maslow Pyramid. body, safety; relationships, success; self actualisation. Here is one I made up: Our search for God can be divided into: family, friends, fame, achievement, wisdom. Notice the Pentad can bring the concept of growth to the Quaternity. In this case the trinity is the goal, and the subdivisions are paths.
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