An Underlying Problem to Finding our Own Unique Path ……. as Individuals and as a Society.

What Is The Purpose of Life?  Does It Matter Anyway.....?

A regular question to the attendees of my philosophy talks in Athens is ‘what is the purpose of life’. It’s not that I particularly like asking this question, it’s just that the underlying ideas behind it seem to crop up quite regularly when discussing various topics within Greek philosophy.

Quite often people seem to assume that I’m asking about ‘divine purposes’ or any reason or purpose that a God (should one exist) decide to create the universe and everything in it. Well the audience naturally tend to fall into two camps here depending on their own spiritual position.

The more religious among us start to try and come up with an answer for a universal ‘purpose of life’. Then, oddly in some ways, the people who do not believe in any kind of God or divine hand in the universe answer the question negatively, saying there is no purpose to life whatsoever. Of course, it’s quite difficult answering some of these deep questions off-the-cuff at a talk, so I cannot be completely sure that these people really think there is no purpose at all to life if there is no God.

As I quickly remind to the non-religious people - whether we are religious / spiritual and not - at some level we all still need to have ‘some’ purpose in life as we get out of bed in the morning and go about our daily routines. I disagree that no God necessarily means no purpose whatsoever.

……. and then we start to get to the nub of the question; or rather my intended question. For example, if someone asked me whether the pen I am writing with is a good pen or not, I can say yes or no, only because I know what a pen is - and what it is for. The same is true of say a glass to drink water from. Does it achieve its known purpose well or not….  However, if I asked someone whether they were a good person or not, if they do not know what a person actually is – and what our purpose is – then it is pretty difficult to say yes or no with any certainty; and everybody’s opinion about themselves and the way they live would be as good as anyone else’s. There would no recognizable truth to anyone’s answer. (Be careful of one of the traps with this. I asked a young gentleman ‘what’ he was and he replied that he was an engineer – and a good one too. Of course, this would not necessarily make him a good person…… it’s not quite the same thing.)

So when we start to talk about and consider finding the right path, and being ‘good’ people who use our time wisely (or at least fairly wisely), things start to get a little complicated. It is easy enough to know whether we are simply ‘busy’ people – but again, that is not the same thing at all. Afterall, some of the worse tyrants in history were fairly busy people…...

If we do not have ‘some’ idea of what our purpose is as individuals - surely it gets difficult to say with any certainty what the best or better path for us to follow actually is, and indeed, what sorts of things we should be doing and not doing so often along that path, and how we use our time.

Perhaps this is one of the underlying problems with society as a whole in the 21^st century as traditional religious explanations of the world have tended to crumble to the forces of the media, consumerism and scientific dogmatism.

Whether we are religious or not - without some idea of what the main purpose of a human being is and what it is for - surely it will be difficult to say with any certainty at all whether our goals and objectives (indeed purposes) are good and wise ones, or foolish.

 

[Comments welcome below]

https://www.oraclesfromdelphi.org/

Text for Meetup Group Members For the Talk on Plato's Cave

 

Extracts of Plato’s Cave:

(Plato’s Book Republic – 514a to 517a)

Translated by:  Waterfield, Robin. Republic (Oxford World's Classics) OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

(Socrates is recounting a discussion he has had previously with his friend Glaucon - regarding the education of the young - and the future leaders of the Athenian state.)

The Prisoner Ascends from the Cave   (Plato’s Republic – 514a to 517a)

514a ‘Next,’ I said, ‘here’s a situation which you can use as an analogy for the human condition—for our education or lack of it. Imagine people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground; at the far end of the cave, a long way off, there’s an entrance open to the outside world. They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and necks tied up in a way which keeps them in one place and allows them to look only straight ahead, but not to turn their heads. There’s firelight burning a long way further up the cave behind them, and up the slope between the fire and the prisoners there’s a road, beside which you should imagine a low wall has been built—like the partition which conjurors place between themselves and their audience and above which they show their tricks.’ b

‘All right,’ he said.

‘Imagine also that there are people on the other side of this wall who are carrying all sorts of artefacts. These artefacts, human statuettes, and animal models carved in stone and wood and all kinds of materials stick out over the wall; and as you’d expect, some of the people talk as they carry these objects along, while others are silent.’ c

This is a strange picture you’re painting,’ he said, ‘with strange prisoners.’    515a   

‘They’re no different from us,’ I said. ‘I mean, in the first place, do you think they’d see anything of themselves and one another except the shadows cast by the fire on to the cave wall directly opposite them?’

‘Of course not,’ he said.

 ‘They’re forced to spend their lives without moving their heads.’ ‘And what about the objects which were being carried along? Won’t they only see their shadows as well?’ b

‘Naturally.’

 ‘Now, suppose they were able to talk to one another: don’t you think they’d assume that their words applied to what they saw passing by in front of them?

‘They couldn’t think otherwise.’

“And what if sound echoed off the prison wall opposite them? When any of the passers-by spoke, don’t you think they’d be bound to assume that the sound came from a passing shadow?’

‘I’m absolutely certain of it,’ he said.

‘All in all, then,’ I said, ‘the shadows of artefacts would constitute the only reality people in this situation would recognize.’ c

‘That’s absolutely inevitable,’ he agreed. d

‘What do you think would happen, then,’ I asked, ‘if they were set free from their bonds and cured of their inanity? What would it be like if they found that happening to them? Imagine that one of them has been set free and is suddenly made to stand up, to turn his head and walk, and to look towards the firelight. It hurts him to do all this and he’s too dazzled to be capable of making out the objects whose shadows he’d formerly been looking at. And suppose someone tells him that what he’s been seeing all this time has no substance, and that he’s now closer to reality and is seeing more accurately, because of the greater reality of the things in front of his eyes—what do you imagine his reaction would be? And what do you think he’d say if he were shown any of the passing objects and had to respond to being asked what it was? Don’t you think he’d be bewildered and would think that there was more reality in what he’d been seeing before than in what he was being shown now?’

‘Far more,’ he said.

‘And if he were forced to look at the actual firelight, don’t you think it would hurt his eyes? Don’t you think he’d turn away and run back to the things he could make out, and would take the truth of the matter to be that these things are clearer than what he was being shown?’ e

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘And imagine him being dragged forcibly away from there up the rough, steep slope,’ I went on, ‘without being released until he’s been pulled out into the sunlight. Wouldn’t this treatment cause him pain and distress? And once he’s reached the sunlight, he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things which are currently taken to be real, would he, because his eyes would be overwhelmed by the sun’s beams?’

‘No, he wouldn’t,’ he answered, ‘not straight away.’516a

‘He wouldn’t be able to see things up on the surface of the earth, I suppose, until he’d got used to his situation. At first, it would be shadows that he could most easily make out, then he’d move on to the reflections of people and so on in water, and later he’d be able to see the actual things themselves. Next, he’d feast his eyes on the heavenly bodies and the heavens themselves, which would be easier at night: he’d look at the light of the stars and the moon, rather than at the sun and sunlight during the daytime.’ b

‘Of course.’

And imagine, he’d be able to discern and feast his eyes on the sun—not the displaced image of the sun in water or elsewhere, but the sun on its own, in its proper place.’

‘Yes, he’d inevitably come to that,’ he said.

‘After that, he’d start to think about the sun and he’d deduce that it is the source of the seasons and the yearly cycle, that the whole of the visible realm is its domain, and that in a sense everything which he and his peers used to see is its responsibility.’ c

‘Yes, that would obviously be the next point he’d come to,’ he agreed.

‘Now, if he recalled the cell where he’d originally lived and what passed for knowledge there and his former fellow prisoners, don’t you think he’d feel happy about his own altered circumstances, and sorry for them?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Suppose that the prisoners used to assign prestige and credit to one another, in the sense that they rewarded speed at recognizing the shadows as they passed, and the ability to remember which ones normally come earlier and later and at the same time as which other ones, and expertise at using this as a basis for guessing which ones would arrive next. Do you think our former prisoner would covet these honours and would envy the people who had status and power there, or would he much prefer, as Homer describes it, “being a slave labouring for someone else—someone without property”, and would put up with anything at all, in fact, rather than share their beliefs and their life?’ d

‘Yes, I think he’d go through anything rather than live that way,’ he said. e

‘Here’s something else I’d like your opinion about,’ I said. ‘If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn’t the sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by darkness?’

 ‘Certainly,’ he replied.

‘Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time, and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn’t seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Wouldn’t he make a fool of himself? Wouldn’t they say that he’d come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn’t even worth trying to go up there? And wouldn’t they—if they could—grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there, and kill him?’

‘They certainly would,’ he said.   517a

The Escaped Prisoner Must Go Down Into The Darkness Again To Help The Others

(Republic-519c/d to 520e):

 

‘Our job as founders, then,’ I said, ‘is to make sure that the best people come to that fundamental field of study (as we called it earlier): we must have them make the ascent we’ve been talking about and see goodness. And afterwards, once they’ve been up there and had a good look, we mustn’t let them get away with what they do at the moment.’  e

‘Which is what?’

 ‘Staying there,’ I replied, ‘and refusing to come back down again to those prisoners, to share their work and their rewards, no matter whether those rewards are trivial or significant.’

‘But in that case,’ he protested, ‘we’ll be wronging them: we’ll be making the quality of their lives worse and denying them the better life they could be living, won’t we?’

‘You’re again forgetting, my friend,’ I said, ‘that the point of legislation is not to make one section of a community better off than the rest, but to engineer this for the community as a whole. Legislators should persuade or compel the members of a community to mesh together, should make every individual share with his fellows the benefit which he is capable of contributing to the common welfare, and should ensure that the community does contain people with this capacity; and the purpose of all this is not for legislators to leave people to choose their own directions, but for them to use people to bind the community together.’ e

520a

‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘I was forgetting.’ b

 ‘I think you’ll also find, Glaucon,’ I said, ‘that we won’t be wronging any philosophers who arise in our community. Our remarks, as we force them to take care of their fellow citizens and be their guardians, will be perfectly fair. We’ll tell them that it’s reasonable for philosophers who happen to occur in other communities not to share the work of those communities, since their occurrence was spontaneous, rather than planned by the political system of any of the communities in question, and it’s fair for anything which arises spontaneously and doesn’t owe its nurture to anyone or anything to have no interest in repaying anyone for having provided its nourishment. “We’ve bred you, however,” we’ll say, “to act, as it were, as the hive’s leaders and kings, for your own good as well as that of the rest of the community…..

You’ve received a better and more thorough education than those other philosophers, and you’re more capable of playing a part in both spheres. So each of you must, when your time comes, descend to where the rest of the community lives, and get used to looking at things in the dark. The point is that once you become acclimatized, you’ll see infinitely better than the others there; your experience of genuine right, morality, and goodness will enable you to identify every one of the images and recognize what it is an image of.

And then the administration of our community—ours as well as yours—will be in the hands of people who are awake, as distinct from the norm nowadays of communities being governed by people who shadow-box and fall out with one another in their dreams over who should rule, as if that were a highly desirable thing to do. No, the truth of the matter is this: the less keen the would-be rulers of a community are to rule, the better and less divided the administration of that community is bound to be, but where the rulers feel the opposite, the administration is bound to be the opposite.”’ c d

end

Plato's Other World of the FORMS - and Understanding The Myth of the Cave Better

Plato's Other World - and Starting to Understand ‘The Myth of the Cave’ Better; and why this might be connected to living sustainably – and in a happier and more preferable way generally….

... Very basically, Plato believed that there was another world all around us that we cannot usually see with our eyes, but it is actually there; and that in some ways this is the ‘real’ world - in the sense of it being more important than the world we see all around us and that we interact with using our human bodily senses. This ‘invisible’ world, to put it simply, we can only interact with by using our mind and intellect, hence; it has come to be known as the ‘intelligible’ world amongst people who discuss Plato, as oppose to the ‘sensible’ world which we interact with using our human senses. This is a very basic and simple outline of this area.

Socrates also keeps it simple, as usual, and says most of us are like frogs living around a pond. We do not realise that there is another bigger and far more important world just on the other side of the motor way. Of course, he did not actually say motorway…. but you get the idea. Socrates also uses the famous ‘Myth of the Cave’ (Republic-514a) in part to explain that we do not see how it ‘really’ is, but only see a tiny part of what the world and universe is all about. It is a notable coincidence that modern physicists and cosmologists on the cutting edge of science today predict that we are only seeing a small part of what the universe is made of and how it really is. For example, the ‘many worlds’ approach to answer some questions in quantum physics is a respected theory – although as yet far from proven. Although the ideas of modern physics to be found in Plato might make an interesting essay for another book, it is not under the remit of this introductory essay, and so let us now go down into the darkness of Plato’s important Myth of the Cave.

In the Myth of the Cave, Socrates talks allegorically about prisoners who have been kept underground since birth in special chairs with their heads fixed facing a wall. There is an odd arrangement of a wood fire and a path through the cave behind them, which means that they have only ever seen the reflections of objects on a wall in front of them as the objects pass along the path behind them. The prisoners have never seen the objects or other people that go along the path for real, but only the reflections on the wall in front of them. To amuse themselves as the years pass by, the prisoners give the reflections on the wall names, and have competitions on who can guess what object (or rather reflections) they will see next. Of course, the unfortunate prisoners think that what they see is the real thing. They have no idea that what they are seeing is just a reflection or shadow of the real object.

Now one of the prisoners is set free from his chair, and is ‘dragged’ slowly up the bumpy tunnel from the dark underground cave to the surface and to the ‘light’. It hurts his eyes at first as he slowly makes his way up the tunnel because he has always been used to the darkness of the cave. It takes time for his eyes and mind to adjust as he gets higher up the tunnel and nearer the light at the entrance of the cave. Finally, he reaches the surface and steps into the bright sunlight; and after his eyes have had more time to adjust, he is able to see things as they really are for the first time, and not just as mere reflections on the dimly lit wall of the cave. This is a good moment for all new seekers of wisdom and enlightenment to pause and ask themselves what Plato means by this myth – and why does the prisoner need to be ‘dragged’ up the tunnel to the light? (Note: More about The Cave soon…. and why many people in the modern world do not want to leave it….)

(Piece above taken from Life Choices – New Edition 2019 p/s 44-46)

‘Plato’s Academy’ versus ‘The Platonic Academy’

‘Plato’s Academy’ versus ‘The Platonic Academy’

(the quickest of summaries….)

Extract below taken from James’ Monday night talk in Athens:
'Socrates, Plato, Know Yourself and Live Moderately’.

    

     Although tonight is not a history lesson – I do want to give you now just a few dates and facts now about Socrates and Plato. Socrates lived for 69 or 70 years and died 400 b.c.e. [….or 399 to be precise with the dates... which in most ways we do not need to be as philosophers - rather than historians)   So if we do the maths …. 400’ish B.C.E. less 70 - means Socrates was born about 469 or 470 B.C.E.   Now Socrates had many students over the years – but he did not run a school and have loads of students like a regular teacher - or usually give talks to big groups of people. (There were just a few exceptions to this…)  He spoke to small groups of people and friends and to individuals mostly. As mentioned - the most well known of these friends and students was Plato – who was born about 40 years after Socrates – so that’s about 430 B.C.  (or 428 for those who like to be precise :)   The philosophical interaction and friendship between the two of them can only of lasted about 12 to 15 years at most – which is not a long time really.

     Yet; Socrates had a profound effect on Plato – who after Socrates death (when he was still only a young man about 30) started writing down the words and ideas of his teacher and friend Socrates in books – usually as short dialogues - between Socrates and whoever he was talking to at the time. (Incidentally - Socrates sentenced to death by suicide and Plato distraught and disgusted – but we won’t go into that this evening… It’s all in Plato’s book ‘Phaedo’ if you are interested.)

     Now there is quite rightly – much academic controversy about Plato’s books in the matter of how much of what he wrote was truly Socrates words and ideas – and how much was Plato giving his own views and ideas through the mouthpiece of Socrates in his books. Remember – as 90% of what we know about Socrates comes from the books of Plato this is pretty important if you are interested in this stuff. These days, most commentators on the subject agree that probably Plato’s earlier books were closer records of the words and ideas of Socrates - than perhaps some of his later books which may of contained some (or a lot depending on your point of view) of Plato’s own ideas and stories as well.  [My own opinion on this is….. he didn’t need a mouthpiece… + often obvious when he was or was not using Socrates mouth… eg Gorgias…]

     As well as writing these books about Socrates - 10 years after Socrates death – Plato now aged about 40 – decided to open a school for philosophy – and opens the first ever ‘academy’ – Plato’s Academy …. for general studies and the study of philosophy in its various forms. This is where the word ‘academy’ comes from – literally…. ( By the way - the site of this old academy – the first ‘academy’ in the world ever - is just a 15 minute bus ride out of the centre of Athens if you are interested…. and I can tell you how to get there later if you want.)

The School of Athens is one of the most famous frescoes by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It is in the Vatican Museum of Rome - and is huge! Well worth the the trip...

     So this friend and student of Socrates ‘Plato’ opens his academy 10 years after Socrates death in 399/400 B.C. and this educational institution (and I emphasise the name ‘Plato’s Academy’ ) then carries on almost uninterrupted as a place of learning in Athens– for about 400 years until 86 BCE when this original academy was closed and destroyed during the Mithridatic Wars– and the students and teachers scattered to some other cities – notably to Alexandria in Egypt.

     Then another 400 years or so later – in about 410 CE some other philosophers, now usually referred to as the Neo-Platonists, opened a new philosophy school calling it ‘the Platonic Academy’ – and in many ways revived the interest in the written texts of Plato – although some of the interpretations of the texts they gave have been controversially received by modern commentators. Some respected commentators say that the Neo-Platonists (such as Proclus) have helped to explain the deeper and hidden meanings within Plato’s original texts; but other respected commentators would say they have added their own later interpretations to the texts and have nothing much of value to add to our understanding of Plato’s writing - and indeed the central ideas of Socrates. Like many arguments, as indeed Socrates himself says in the Phaedo, there are probably good and bad points in both points of view. This is a pretty involved discussion and not one we need to concern ourselves with in any depth this evening – but something just to make you aware of. In any case this new later Platonic Academy came to an end in 529 CE when the Roman Emperor Justinian closed all the philosophical schools in Athens, of which there were several – and not just this new ‘Platonic Academy’.

     Let’s also consider all the schools, colleges and universities around the world today that study Socrates and Plato in one way or another….

     Now what on earth did all these old Platonic academies back then - and modern schools and colleges around the world today study -  and what was it about Socrates and Plato that so many people worldwide have found so important for so long?