Was Plato a Dualist

[Simon Adams]

Hi all

I keep reading that Plato was a dualist, most recently in this article where almost every sentence seems like nonsense to me. However I’m no philosopher so I need a sanity check.

To get to basics, Plato used the analogy of the cave. In this the material world is equivalent to the shadows on the wall. I appreciate that this isn’t how Plato actually put it, but it seems unlikely he would have a problem with me saying that the real world is that which the shadow is of, the world of ideas, from archetypes/universals he called forms?

If so, how can this be described as dualism? Is there any being to the shadow that is not from the form or idea? Is there any substance, any cause, anything tangible at all that exists only in the shadow?

As far as I can tell, the only significantly unique aspect of the shadow - and I admit it is significant - is when the form associates itself completely with it’s shadow, sees nothing but shadows. Whilst this is significant in terms of individuals grounded in the modern and post modern world, can it really be considered significant from a metaphysical perspective?

[Eugene I]

Here is the Wikipedia explanation, but it would be interesting to find the actual quotes form Plato stating that "matter is real" to prove it

Platonism and neoplatonism
Plato's theory of forms or "ideas" describes ideal forms (for example the platonic solids in geometry or abstracts like Goodness and Justice), as universals existing independently of any particular instance.[22] Arne Grøn calls this doctrine "the classic example of a metaphysical idealism as a transcendent idealism",[23] while Simone Klein calls Plato "the earliest representative of metaphysical objective idealism". Nevertheless, Plato holds that matter is real, though transitory and imperfect, and is perceived by our body and its senses and given existence by the eternal ideas that are perceived directly by our rational soul. Plato was therefore a metaphysical and epistemological dualist, an outlook that modern idealism has striven to avoid:[24] Plato's thought cannot therefore be counted as idealist in the modern sense.

With the neoplatonist Plotinus, wrote Nathaniel Alfred Boll "there even appears, probably for the first time in Western philosophy, idealism that had long been current in the East even at that time, for it taught... that the soul has made the world by stepping from eternity into time...".[25][26] Similarly, in regard to passages from the Enneads, "The only space or place of the world is the soul" and "Time must not be assumed to exist outside the soul".[27] Ludwig Noiré wrote: "For the first time in Western philosophy we find idealism proper in Plotinus".[5] However, Plotinus does not address whether we know external objects,[28] unlike Schopenhauer and other modern philosophers.

[Simon Adams]

Thanks Eugene. I’ve ordered a few books to see if they can help clear this up for me a bit further.

[AshvinP]

Thanks Eugene. I’ve ordered a few books to see if they can help clear this up for me a bit further.

I would submit we have good reason to think noone at that time was a substance dualist or pluralist. The thought of spirit, soul and matter being separate substances which are equally real, as in matter can exist independently of conscious activity, never occurred to them.

[Simon Adams]

Yes that’s my thought as well. Even the atomists like Democritus weren’t dualists as far as I’m aware.

Property dualism is a different matter, and the story seems to be that Aristotle specifically rejected Plato’s view that the form, the immaterial aspect, could survive independently. But this is where I’m confused, as in Plato’s cave analogy, the shadow is never really independent to start with. Aristotle studied under Plato so it seems unlikely that he misunderstood him, but his hylomorphic dualism does seem less like idealism than Plato. Also Neoplatonism is clearly a kind of idealism, and in many ways is the centre of idealism in the western tradition for centuries.

So from my admittedly very superficial perspective, Plato was an idealist and not in any way a dualist. But intelligent philosophers who have spent years studying his works think he was a dualist...

[AshvinP]

Yes that’s my thought as well. Even the atomists like Democritus weren’t dualists as far as I’m aware.

Property dualism is a different matter, and the story seems to be that Aristotle specifically rejected Plato’s view that the form, the immaterial aspect, could survive independently. But this is where I’m confused, as in Plato’s cave analogy, the shadow is never really independent to start with. Aristotle studied under Plato so it seems unlikely that he misunderstood him, but his hylomorphic dualism does seem less like idealism than Plato. Also Neoplatonism is clearly a kind of idealism, and in many ways is the centre of idealism in the western tradition for centuries.

So from my admittedly very superficial perspective, Plato was an idealist and not in any way a dualist. But intelligent philosophers who have spent years studying his works think he was a dualist...

That's the power of the unexamined Cartesian habit of mind. There are highly intelligent and influential theist scholars who have spent their entire lives studying scripture and theology, yet still believe Genesis is describing a literal creation of a material universe from the immaterial Mind of God, which then affects every other aspect of their 'Biblical' theology. I wonder how many careers would be destroyed and books would need to be 'rewritten' and interviews disclaimed if they were to abandon dualism for idealism? Damn near all of them I suspect.

[Simon Adams]

That's the power of the unexamined Cartesian habit of mind. There are highly intelligent and influential theist scholars who have spent their entire lives studying scripture and theology, yet still believe Genesis is describing a literal creation of a material universe from the immaterial Mind of God, which then affects every other aspect of their 'Biblical' theology. I wonder how many careers would be destroyed and books would need to be 'rewritten' and interviews disclaimed if they were to abandon dualism for idealism? Damn near all of them I suspect.

You may be surprised, but I don’t see any significant problem there. I don’t think there is any theology that claims to know the specifics of what it means to create a universe from nothing. At some point it always goes back to something we can’t possibly understand, whose perspective we can’t even imagine, ‘speaking’ the universe into existence. I’m not sure it really makes a huge amount of difference at that point whether you frame that in a dualist or an idealist framework?

For us, speaking is materialising our thoughts in a deliberate way, for a purpose. As an analogy, that seems to me to stay the same whether you interpret it from an idealist perspective such as panentheism, or from a more dualist, cartesian perspective.

However I’m sure many would disagree with this, and associate idealism with the idea that the universe IS god. This is very different and as you say, would involve a lot of theology being torn up. But I may well be unique here in that not making any sense to me. I don’t claim to know what the universe is, and I do believe god is both transcendent and immanent. In some ways the universe seems like an organism, conscious but not meta conscious. At some level we are surely connected to and part of this, but of course the other aspect of theological idealism that is different from modern idealism is that our individuality has a being that transcends this conscious unity, we are beings not just part of being. To me this is part of what it means to be made in the image of god.

Anyway it’s late and I seem to have got a bit carried away a bit there. It’s nice to be on ground that makes sense to me. As I move through different areas of philosophy I find myself getting a bit lost trying to fit it all together. I think sometimes the best thing to do at that point it to stop reading and thinking, and let the churned up mud settle for a while

[AshvinP]

That's the power of the unexamined Cartesian habit of mind. There are highly intelligent and influential theist scholars who have spent their entire lives studying scripture and theology, yet still believe Genesis is describing a literal creation of a material universe from the immaterial Mind of God, which then affects every other aspect of their 'Biblical' theology. I wonder how many careers would be destroyed and books would need to be 'rewritten' and interviews disclaimed if they were to abandon dualism for idealism? Damn near all of them I suspect.

You may be surprised, but I don’t see any significant problem there. I don’t think there is any theology that claims to know the specifics of what it means to create a universe from nothing. At some point it always goes back to something we can’t possibly understand, whose perspective we can’t even imagine, ‘speaking’ the universe into existence. I’m not sure it really makes a huge amount of difference at that point whether you frame that in a dualist or an idealist framework?

For us, speaking is materialising our thoughts in a deliberate way, for a purpose. As an analogy, that seems to me to stay the same whether you interpret it from an idealist perspective such as panentheism, or from a more dualist, cartesian perspective.

But modern theists don't claim the universe is created from nothing. They claim it is created in time by an eternal timeless Being. So they add onto idealism additional steps of Mind creating matter and matter evolving into planet Earth (unless they hold to 'young Earth', which involves no evolution), and then Mind intervening again to create life and later still to create humans. These additional steps are necessitated by the original premise that a real material world was created by Mind. And those steps frame the rest of their Judeo-Christian theology, i.e. especially the conceptions of original sin, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, and eschatology.

[Simon Adams]

But modern theists don't claim the universe is created from nothing. They claim it is created in time by an eternal timeless Being.

So they add onto idealism additional steps of Mind creating matter and matter evolving into planet Earth (unless they hold to 'young Earth', which involves no evolution), and then Mind intervening again to create life and later still to create humans. These additional steps are necessitated by the original premise that a real material world was created by Mind. And those steps frame the rest of their Judeo-Christian theology, i.e. especially the conceptions of original sin, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, and eschatology.

I don’t really know much about the US protestant groups, other than the fact they tend to be literalists and have some ideas like ‘young earth creationism’, reject evolution etc. The catholic church and the eastern churches have since before Augustine in the fourth century believed in creation ‘ex nihilo’, creation ‘out of nothing’. This was different from Plato and neoplatonism which both influenced early christian ideas, and included the creation of time itself. Of course some of the scholastics took a more aristotelean influence in the middle ages, but even they kept creation ex nihilo (as did the Jews and Muslims as far as I’m aware), and I don’t know of any modern catholic or orthodox theologians that talk about creation “in time”. I do know that some more modern protestant theologians like Calvin criticised Augustine for his comments about it not being possible to understand what the “six days” of creation in Genesis actually meant, and that they tend to have more literalist interpretations, but clearly modern cosmology has born out the catholic understanding.

That said, you are of course right that theology has the universe as significantly different from god. The universe is contained within him and he transcends it, but even though the “ideas” that shape the universe come from him, there is a distinction between him and the universe that is different from many forms of idealism. However when you say that god “intervenes”, in catholic theology this is not the mechanistic type of intervention you have in some US protestant versions, it’s usually framed around immanence, in other words the ways in which god is present within the universe. This is where you have different interpretations that go from a kind of dualism in the Thomist tradition, to a more idealist version in the likes of Augustine and Bonaventure, right to the eastern orthodox church which is far closer to panentheism. But it would be wrong to see this as completely different understandings, more a different emphasis. It’s not as if Aquinas rejects anything in Augustine, more that he includes the hylomorphic elements from Aristotle, Avicenna etc, but these are nothing at all like the substance dualism of Descartes.

There are also some interesting discussions happening in the church right now. For example;

Quest (188) declares that "The mystery of the living God, utterly transcendent, is also the creative power who dwells at the heart of the world sustaining every moment of its evolution." The book goes on to suggest that the Spirit not only dwells within the world but also surrounds our emerging, struggling, living, dying, and renewing planet of life and the whole universe itself. It illustrates this with Luther’s great image of God in and around a grain; with Augustine’s magnificent image of the whole creation like a finite sponge floating in an infinite sea, necessarily filled in its every pore with water; and with the beautiful image of the pregnant female body (backed up by Moses’ reprimand of the Israelites’ infidelity: "you forgot the God who gave you birth" - Deut 32:18).

These are all heuristic images that help theology explore divine immanence. As Quest explains, they increase understanding of the utterly transcendent God who yet is not far from us, being the One "inwhom we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28)

https://www.ncronline.org/news/parish/j ... -committee

[AshvinP]

But modern theists don't claim the universe is created from nothing. They claim it is created in time by an eternal timeless Being.

So they add onto idealism additional steps of Mind creating matter and matter evolving into planet Earth (unless they hold to 'young Earth', which involves no evolution), and then Mind intervening again to create life and later still to create humans. These additional steps are necessitated by the original premise that a real material world was created by Mind. And those steps frame the rest of their Judeo-Christian theology, i.e. especially the conceptions of original sin, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, and eschatology.

I don’t really know much about the US protestant groups, other than the fact they tend to be literalists and have some ideas like ‘young earth creationism’, reject evolution etc. The catholic church and the eastern churches have since before Augustine in the fourth century believed in creation ‘ex nihilo’, creation ‘out of nothing’. This was different from Plato and neoplatonism which both influenced early christian ideas, and included the creation of time itself. Of course some of the scholastics took a more aristotelean influence in the middle ages, but even they kept creation ex nihilo (as did the Jews and Muslims as far as I’m aware), and I don’t know of any modern catholic or orthodox theologians that talk about creation “in time”. I do know that some more modern protestant theologians like Calvin criticised Augustine for his comments about it not being possible to understand what the “six days” of creation in Genesis actually meant, and that they tend to have more literalist interpretations, but clearly modern cosmology has born out the catholic understanding.

That said, you are of course right that theology has the universe as significantly different from god. The universe is contained within him and he transcends it, but even though the “ideas” that shape the universe come from him, there is a distinction between him and the universe that is different from many forms of idealism. However when you say that god “intervenes”, in catholic theology this is not the mechanistic type of intervention you have in some US protestant versions, it’s usually framed around immanence, in other words the ways in which god is present within the universe. This is where you have different interpretations that go from a kind of dualism in the Thomist tradition, to a more idealist version in the likes of Augustine and Bonaventure, right to the eastern orthodox church which is far closer to panentheism. But it would be wrong to see this as completely different understandings, more a different emphasis. It’s not as if Aquinas rejects anything in Augustine, more that he includes the hylomorphic elements from Aristotle, Avicenna etc, but these are nothing at all like the substance dualism of Descartes.

Simon, yes you are correct they believed in 'creation ex nihilo' in so far as the eternal Mind is not a 'thing'. And you are also correct I am referring mostly to post-Reformation protestant conceptions which are heavily influenced by Cartesian substance dualism. I do not believe Christian scripture or traditions from Eastern Orthodox or RC necessitate any sort of dualism, otherwise I would not consider myself a Christian. In short, I believe post-Reformation theology, under the influence of Cartesian dualism, has generated all sorts of flawed doctrines and eschatological conceptions which only serve to push people farther away from the Christian faith or provide a superficial faith which will not endure when tested. To the extent RC and EO have been influenced by post-Reformation theology, they have the same problems. But I do agree that influence has been far less than Protestant denominations.