Ultimate and Relative

The realms of Plato and Socrates, according to the philosophy of Paul Deussen

(Paul Deussen was a German Schopenhauerean philosopher and Indologist of the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. He founded the Schopenhauer Society, and was an enthusiastic translator of Indian religious texts).

“Socrates, without concealing the fact that he neither rightly understood nature, nor the profound views of nature of his predecessors, had turned away voluntarily from both in order to direct all the power of his mind to a single subject, the action of man, a one-sidedness which, though justifiable was fatal to philosophy. ....So in Plato’s vast mind the tendency towards Ideas realised in nature, which he had received from the teaching of Heraclitus and Parmenides, was combined with the Socratic striving after concepts to be realised in the action of man”¹

What Paul Deussen says in the above quotation is that Socrates (and of course, Deussen is speculating, albeit, informed by the available texts) was interested in improving the ethical life of humans, and that this eclipsed all else in his philosophy proper, including as mentioned, the philosophy of nature (phusis). This purpose diminished focus on all except what pertained to his mission of stirring his audience to self-improvement. His disciple, Plato, was therefore, away from his own more purely ‘metaphysical’ bent, pulled to entangle his thought in an uncomfortable synthesis of the ethical and metaphysical. The enigmatic nature of the dialogues testifies to both the nigh-on-impossiblity of amalgamating these things, as well as Plato’s awesome intellectual power. Little wonder he came to be considered as something like an avatar of the divine.

“It was Plato who, animated by a metaphysical spirit, directed to Being-in-itself, turned his searching gaze on the inconstant flight of the phenomenal world, in order to find out, what amid the “flux of becoming” of Heraclitus was the Being of Parmenides, what amid the ceaseless coming into existence and perishing of things was unchangeable and constant”

What was revealed to Plato by his searching gaze was that throughout all that is encompassed by perception, certain repeated appearances, and series of appearances, are manifest. These repeated appearances, or forms, he took and conceived as images, the eidola, of the Ideas ; eternal, unchanging paradigms, or prototypes, which themselves act, projecting themselves into the flux of non-being, or the realm of space and time, thus constituting the world, or realm of Becoming.

The realm of Becoming is the world we assume to be the real one. For Plato, this world does indeed exist; but it is not real, not in the ultimate sense. It is a derivative, a reflection, phenomenon, illusion. However, it was not until Kant that philosophy (in Europe at least) discovered that ‘time and space’ were modes of our understanding, that is, subjective (though not by that, individual) functions in the human mind, objectively manifest as the human brain, and not forms of the being-in-itself of the world. Absent these forms, then Plato’s Ideas remain the primary expression, or as Arthur Schopenhauer would have it, the adequate objectification of the inner nature or Being-in-itself of the world. In other words, the Ideas are like “the coloured pictures in the glass of the magic lantern through which the light of the Will throws on the wall of time, space, and causality the shadow-play of the phenomenal world”

“Thus we see, wherever the eye turns, only phenomena, not thing-in-themselves; and the whole realm of nature, wherever expanded in all spheres of the heavens, shows us indeed in all it’s parts, the thousand-fold repeated images, eidola homoiomata of Ideas, but not Ideas, not Will, not Being-in-itself”

For Deussen, Plato’s devotion to his master Socrates led to an unfortunate conflation of realms in his philosophy, namely the ethical and the metaphysical (or, the physical in the sense of Phusis, which includes the spiritual, heaven and the God/s). While Socrates undoubtedly performed a worthy, the worthiest even, of social duties in the world of relativity (what world the ancient Indian sages named ‘maya’, illusion) and of relative truths, his disciple struggled to combine the latter with his own powerful intuitions of the ultimate reality of being.

However, ultimate, or absolute reality, is it’s own justification. Rather, it is beyond just or unjust, beyond ethical judgement. It can be imperfectly described, but not prescribed. Ethics pertains to relative existence, mundane existence, and has it’s truth/s therein. In the relative world, there are things to fix and improve. Ultimately, nothing is, nor can, nor needs be improved or fixed.

TWO TRUTHS

“The spring of life, it’s hidden root

may wind beneath the plenum vast,

in you and I, in all forsooth-

But on this surface too, we’re cast”

1. All quotations are from “The Elements of Metaphysics” by Paul Deussen, 1894