Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 43

21 April 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 43

1.  One way of looking at Platonism is that Platonism consists of both things to be cultivated and things to be restrained, diminished, or eliminated.  The Platonist practitioner cultivates the Virtues such as Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance.  The Platonist practitioner also cultivates a relationship with the classics of Platonism such as the Dialogues and the Enneads; reading them, studying them, discussing them, and deepening his understanding of them.  And thirdly, the Platonist practitioner cultivates contemplation which at first is difficult but over time becomes more and more a part of the practice of Platonism.

In contrast, Platonism also has a system of ethical restraints such as non-harming and vegetarianism and sexual restraint including chastity and recommending a minimalist life, which is to say a life with minimal possessions.  This system of restraints strongly resembles the Precepts and Vows of Dharmic traditions; this resemblance is a primary reason why I think Platonism more closely resembles a Dharma, such as Buddhism, Jainism, or Hinduism, than it does what is currently thought of as philosophy in the West.  I hope to have more to say about this in a future post.

This weaving of cultivation and restraint in a Platonist practitioner’s life creates a sense of balance.  There is ethical asceticism and there is the acquisition and growth of wisdom.  There is letting go and acquiring.  

2.  One of the things about the Dialogues that I think is worth pondering is that Plato doesn’t have the perspective of progress.  Instead, Plato sees things from the perspective of that which is unchanging such as noetic realities.  I noticed this in particular while reading the Laws.  The setup for the dialogue is that the three participants in the dialogue are considering writing a new set of laws, a constitution, for a new colony in Crete.  But the three of them strive for instantiating previous examples from various societies to bring this about; this is not striving for something new, rather it is an effort to replicate aspects of the past.  In addition, it is not based on the idea of a ‘revolution’ which is something very widespread in modernity.  It is so widespread that the idea of ‘revolution’ is used to describe many non-political events such as the ‘scientific revolution’ or a ‘revolution in the arts’ and so forth.   But for Plato it is the past that sets examples to be admired and followed, rather than a speculative future utopia.  This is why, when discussing the arts such as poetry and music, Plato argues for artistic traditions that have lasted thousands of years as what humanity should follow rather than contemporary innovations which Plato views as a decline.

3.  In the Jain tradition Precepts and Vows are interpreted differently depending on the status of those taking, or committing themselves to, the Precepts.  The main distinction is between monastics and laypeople.  Monastics are expected to adhere to the Precepts in a much more extensive and strict manner than laypeople.  For example, the Precept of having few possessions, Aparigraha, for monastics means having only a few items of clothing and a begging bowl and perhaps a whisk to brush away insects from your path (and in some sects it means less than that).  For lay people the restrictions on possessions is much less onerous.  Manuals that focus on these Precepts are devoted to making these distinctions in practice clear; both monastics and lay people take the same initial set of five vows, but how those vows are applied differs.  (A good reference for this approach to ethical restraints or Precepts or Vows is Jaina Yoga by R. Williams.  As far as I know it is only published in India but I have been able to get it from Amazon.)

I wonder if a similar approach to the ethical restraints of Platonism would be helpful?  In a sense you can find this inclination in some of Plato’s dialogues when Plato talks about Guardians living a highly renunciate life, much more so than the average citizen.  Following this kind of suggestion, and using the Jain manuals as a kind of prototype, I think it would be possible to construct a similar approach to the teachings of ethical restraint found in Platonism.  It might be possible to use a lay/monk distinction (I know of a small number of people who think of themselves as Platonist Monks).  

One of the advantages to this is that it provides a sense of participation in the practices of the tradition for people who are not necessarily in a position to manifest a full instantiation of these restraints in their life at this time, or during this lifetime.  For example, a lay person will likely have to have a home and, if the layperson has children, many other things.  On the other hand, living a life with as few possessions as possible is something that a layperson can participate in and many have done so.  This way of interpreting the teachings of ethical restraint also provides people with a sense of the ultimate direction that their practice leads to and how they can be fully instantiated; this is the purpose of people like Platonist Monks who practice Platonist ethical restraint to a much greater degree than most ‘lay’ Platonists.

4.  “Naturalism cannot countenance eternity, especially the thought that that which is eternal can have an explanatory role for the temporal.”

(Lloyd P. Gerson, Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2020, page 97, ISBN: 9781501747250)

4.1  I always enjoy reading Lloyd Gerson’s analyses.  He has such an articulate and clear style, even when he deals with subtle topics.  To be honest, I don’t always follow what he is saying because he is writing, I think, primarily for an academic audience and I’m not an academic.  But enough comes through to make the effort worthwhile like the one sentence jewel I quoted above.

4.2  By ‘naturalism’ Gerson means a philosophical view that regards the only valid explanations for things are ‘mechanistic’ and material.  In Platonism material things have a non-material origin; the forms (and beyond the forms, the Good and the One).  Gerson notes that naturalism was present in ancient Greece primarily among the atomists.  Naturalism is not new, but in the past it was a minority view whereas today naturalism dominates.  However, the situation today is more complicated in that some naturalists are ‘conflicted’ about whether naturalism can explain things like consciousness, thinking, intention, and moral experience (see page 25 of the same book as quoted above).  Still, naturalism has a strong hold on many people’s minds.

4.3  A reality that naturalism seems unable to grasp is eternity; that is because eternity is not a reality accessible to the senses though it can be inferred through abstract analysis that does not seem to contain any contradictions.  Hence the tendency to refuse to ‘countenance’ eternity.

4.4  Platonism distinguishes between the everlasting and the eternal.  The everlasting could be perceived, at least partially.  I am thinking of cyclic processes.  It can also be thought about through the operations of mathematics.

But those are everlasting because of their relationship to the eternal, they are not eternity as it is in itself.  The everlasting participates in eternity in the way that the unity of things participates in the One.  But just as the unity of things is not the Unity of the One as such, so also the everlastingness of some things and processes is not Eternity as such.