This separation of the absolute and eternal, which can be known by logos (reason), from the purely phenomenological, which is now seen as inferior, leaves an indelible stamp on the history of Western philosophy for the subsequent two thousand years. The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses, but all our implicit knowledge. This was the grounds of Nietzsche’s view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability of the nobles to trust intuition: ‘Honest men, he wrote, ‘do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion.’
Degeneration, by this account, begins relatively late in Greece, with Plato, and involves the inability to trust what is implicit or intuitive. ‘What must first be proved is worth little,’ Nietzsche continues in The Twilight of the Idols :
one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this.
With the loss of the power of intuition,
rationality was then hit upon as the saviour ; neither Socrates nor his ‘patients’ had any choice about being rational: it was de rigueur , it was their last resort.
The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or – to be absurdly rational. And if this seems to be just the pardonable excesses of Nietzschean furor , the ravings of an inspired madman, consider these words from Panksepp the neuroscientist:
Although language is the only way we can scientifically bridge the chasm between mind and brain, we should always remember that we humans are creatures that can be deceived as easily by logical rigour as by blind faith … It is possible that some of the fuzzier concepts of folk-psychology may lead us to a more fruitful understanding of the integrative functions of the brain than the rigorous, but constrained, languages of visually observable behavioural acts.
In this later Greek world, truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.
Great philosopher that he undoubtedly was, Plato is not quite straightforward in this respect. Even Plato had intuitions he could not dismiss. What is quite moving, even tragic, in the true sense (because it involves Socrates’ hubristic trust in his own dialectic powers), is to see Socrates/Plato torn between his own intuitions and the awareness that he is no longer at liberty to trust them. Plato was originally a poet and it was his association with Socrates that impressed on him the need to forsake poetry for dialectic.
In The Republic Socrates fulminates against the works of tragedians and other dramatists – such representations definitely harm the minds of their audiences … representations at the third remove from reality, and easy to produce without any knowledge of the truth … all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of reality but merely give us a superficial representation … So great is the natural magic of poetry. Strip it of its poetic colouring, reduce it to plain prose, and I think you know how little it amounts to … the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents and … his art is something that has no serious value.
The work of painters and artists of all kinds, including poets are ‘far removed from reality’, and appeal to ‘an element in us equally far removed from reason, a thoroughly unsound combination’. Art is ‘a poor child born of poor parents’, appeals to ‘a low element in the mind’, and has ‘a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters’. Poets are to be banished from the Republic. 131 All those involved in creative arts deal in deceit: the metaphor is a lie. Calculation (logic) is to be preferred to imagination: denotation to connotation. Being a poet also involves imagining one’s way into many things, and ‘is unsuitable for our state, because there one man does one job and does not play a multiplicity of rôles’: so much for Heraclitus’ insight that one needs to inquire into many things, not just one, if one is not to be led astray. 132 Plato’s proscriptions on music, like so much else about his Republic, remind one of a Soviet-style totalitarian state. There is no need of a wide harmonic range; most rhythms and modes are outlawed; flutes, harps and ‘harpsichords’ are banned, as are all ‘dirges and laments’; and there will be need only of two kinds of music, the kind that encourages civil orderliness, and the kind that sternly encourages us to war. 133 All has been reduced to utility in the service of the will to power. 134
McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7729-7772). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
While McGilchrist sees Socrates and Plato through a Nietzschean lens, I see him through the Christian Neoplatonic lens. I would argue that it’s ironic that the Socrates that Nietzsche sees is the Socrates that comes to us through the Left Brain bias that McG would warn us about.
The idea that Socrates was merely a clever left-brained dialectician like the other Sophists strikes me as silly. If he were only that, I wouldn't find him interesting at all. I see Socrates as a man who was enlightened in the Buddhist sense, as someone who had a satori experience, a deep revelatory experience regarding the nature of the Deep Real, and he came to understood that the world as we ordinarily experienced it was like a shadow compared to the real thing. He used dialectic not as an end in itself but as a technique to wake his listeners up to the fact that the world of opinion, the world given to us by custom, was mostly an illusion, a state of sleepfulness from which one needed to awaken. It is rather like Aquinas and the proofs of God—they do not render the experience of faith, they lay a foundation for it when it is experienced as gift, as revelation. As Tomberg (I think) says of Aquinas's comment about his theology as being like straw–Yes, but what wonderful tinder straw makes to ignite the soul when lightning strikes it.
The true, certainly the more interesting, Socrates is the ecstatic prophet of Love who in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, the disciple of Diotima, someone inspired by Divine Madness who seeks for a deep intuitive experience of the Good, its truth and beauty. The true Socrates was an ecstatic prophet, not a dry logician. The Socrates of the Republic is the Socrates of an aging Plato who like Augustine became cranky and forgetful of what he once felt and understood with such power. Indeed McG seems to recognize this, but sees it as the exception not the rule—
But at the same time, Plato himself needs to use myth in order to explain things that resist formulation in language or dialectic: the allegory of the Cave, or the ring of Gyges, for example. In fact Plato appears ambivalent, and gives hints, particularly in the Symposium , that the realm of the Forms attracts us in a way that transcends the logical; and that those who have intuited the Form of the Good, and the Form of the Beautiful, are compelled to pursue them, and to try to convey them to others, exactly as I have suggested the ideals towards which the right hemisphere is drawn act upon it, contrasting these with the purely abstracted forms of things which are created by the left hemisphere. While awaiting death in prison, Socrates’ daemon (conscience) visited him and repeatedly told him to make music. 135 ‘Whatever urged these exercises on him’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘was something similar to his warning voice’:
it was his Apolline insight that, like some barbarian king, he did not understand the noble image of some god and, in his ignorance, was in danger of committing a sin against a deity. The words spoken by the figure who appeared to Socrates in dream are the only hint of any scruples in him about the limits of logical nature; perhaps, he must have told himself, things which I do not understand are not automatically unreasonable. Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art may even be a necessary correlative and supplement of science? 136
But there is no doubt that it is ultimately the left-hemisphere version of the world that Plato puts forward, for the first time in history; puts forward so strongly that it has taken two thousand years to shake it off. And so it is that perhaps the most profound legacy of the Greeks, their myths, come to be seen as ‘myths’ as we now use the term, false histories. But here is Malinowski on the true nature of myth:
These stories live not by idle interest [that is, not as a sort of primitive science, merely to answer intellectual curiosity], not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications as to how to perform them. 137
This kind of truth cannot be apprehended directly, explicitly; in the attempt, it becomes flattened to two-dimensionality, even deadened, by the left hemisphere. It has to be metaphorised, ‘carried across’ to our world, by mythology and by ritual, in which the gods approach us; or as we begin to approach them, when we stand back in ‘necessary distance’ from our world through sacred drama. So Kerényi writes:
In the domain of myth is to be found not ordinary truth but a higher truth, which permits approaches to itself from the domain of bios [not just life, but ‘the highly characterised life of a human being’, perhaps best rendered, despite the apparent chasm of two millennia, as Dasein ]. These approaches are provided by sacred plays, in which man raises himself to the level of the gods, plays too which bring the gods down from their heights. Mythology, indeed, especially Greek mythology, could in some sense be considered as the play of the gods, in which they approach us.
McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7772-7813). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
And whether or not this is special pleading, is it not possible that Plato as reacting not to the great poets and playwrights but to their second-rate imitators. He could not have been too happy the “truth” of Aristophanese depiction of Socrates. There was a lot of theater in his day, and most of it was not great. Homer was for most Athenians what the Bible has become for most Christians, a dead text that presents fundamentalist truths, rather than sacred mythos in the Malinowski sense. What Plato and Socrates were doing was trying to get those who would listen to go to the source of Deep Truth, not to simply accept its rendering in second-hand form. Neoplatonism as an experience grounded mystical, i.e., irrational, philosophy is not so alien from Socrates/Plato as Nietzcche and McG would have us think.
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