Love as the Gift of Self

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

In the last essay, I explored the meaning of the word ψυχή in the paradoxical saying of Jesus that the man who seeks to save his ψυχή will end up losing it while the man who loses it will end up finding it. Although martyrdom is certainly a high calling, I argued that this saying means more than the sacrifice of one’s life. It means the sacrifice of one’s very self. Giving oneself, giving one’s innermost core, is paradoxically the best way to look after oneself and cause that core to flourish.

In this essay, we will continue our investigation by examining another set of parallel verses that use the same difficult word, ψυχή, and I will argue that the gift of one’s ψυχή is the very essence of love. Many people are capable of rattling off the definition of love as “willing the good of another,” but this understanding of love goes deeper; it understands love as a radical gift of one’s very person.

Once more, we begin from a saying of Jesus that many will have memorized but which contains much more meaning than first meets the eye.

Αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἐντολὴ ἡ ἐμή, ἵνα ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους καθὼς ἠγάπησα ὑμᾶς. μείζονα ταύτης ἀγάπην ούδεὶς ἔχει, ἵνα τις τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ θῇ ὑπὲρ τῶν φίλων αὐτοῦ.

This is my commandment: that you love one another just as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this: that someone should lay down his ψυχή for those whom he holds dear.
(John 15:12–13)

Here again, ψυχή is usually translated as “life,” and when I was a child, I thought Jesus was simply saying that the greatest expression of love is dying for one’s friends.

While the sacrifice of one’s life is obviously a great sacrifice, I would argue that it is not the ultimate sacrifice as people often say at military funerals. After all, people sometimes throw away their lives cheaply to thrill seeking or substance abuse. What Jesus says is even more impressive than the sacrifice of one’s biological life in the final moment of death: It is the sacrifice of one’s ongoing “life” in the sense of one’s whole self. In extreme circumstances, this may indeed demand physical death, but that is the capstone on a whole mode of being, a whole orientation of oneself toward another, that must precede that final act.

The phrasing of giving or laying down the ψυχή is not unique to this gospel passage. In 1 John, we are told that we can know the essence of love by looking to the example of Christ:

ἐν τούτῳ ἐγνώκαμεν τὴν ἀγάπην, ὅτι ἐκεῖνος ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἔθηκεν· καὶ ἡμεῖς ὀφείλομεν ὑπὲρ τῶν ἀδελφῶν τὰς ψυχὰς θεῖναι.

In this we have come to understand love: That he has laid down his ψυχή for our sake, and we ought to lay down our ψυχαί for the sake of our brothers.
(1 John 3:16)

We are told that a good shepherd is the one who “lays down his ψυχή for the sake of his sheep” (John 10:11), and we might think this just means dying when the lions come. But just a few versus later (verse 15), Jesus says “I am laying down my ψυχή for the sake of the sheep” in the present tense. He is not just speaking about his eventual death on the cross, but rather his whole ongoing way of being that culminates in that death.

Following these statements and mirroring the paradox of losing and finding the ψυχή that we examined in the last essay, Jesus goes on to make an enormously important claim loaded with detail critical for our investigation:

Διὰ τοῦτο με ὁ πατὴρ ἀγαπᾷ ὅτι ἐγὼ τίθημι τὴν ψυχὴν μου, ἵνα πάλιν λάβω αὐτήν. οὐδεις αἴρει αὐτὴν ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλ’ ἐγὼ τίθημι αὐτὴν ἀπ’ ἐμαυτοῦ. ἐξουσίαν ἔχω θεῖναι αὐτήν, καὶ ἐξουσίαν ἔχω πάλιν λαβεῖν αὐτήν· ταύτην τὴν ἐντολὴν ἔλαβον παρὰ τοῦ πατρός μου.

This is why the Father loves me: Because I am laying down my ψυχή in order that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I am laying it down from myself. I have the authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it up again. This is the commandment I received from my Father.
(John 10:17–18)

Elsewhere, Jesus says that he does not act “from himself” but only does what he sees or hears from the Father (John 5:19,30, 7:18,28, 8:28, 14:10). Here, however, he insists that offering his ψυχή is his act, done on his own authority, rather than something done to him that he merely accepts passively.

We must pause to note two remarkable details before we move on from this passage. First, it is striking that Jesus says that this act of self-offering is the ground of love that the Father has toward him. Second, it is striking that he lays down his ψυχή in order to take it back again. This would be perplexing if the ψυχή were something inherently bad, signifying selfishness or an ego-identity that must be set aside, annihilated, or absorbed. Instead, Christ himself exemplifies the lesson we learned in the last essay: The ψυχή must be sacrificed precisely because it is so valuable and because this self-offering is the very way to bring it to fulfillment.

Lest we think that this is uniquely Johannine, both Matthew (20:28) and Mark (10:45) record the saying that “the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his ψυχή as a ransom in place of many” and Paul writes this to the Thessalonians: “Longing for you, we wanted to share with you not only the gospel of God but even our own ψυχαί because you became beloved to us” (1 Thessalonians 2:8). Similarly, in Revelation, we are told of the “brethren” who have overcome the Dragon by the “blood of the Lamb and the account of their witness (μαρτυρία)” and who “did not love their ψυχή unto death” (Revelation 12:11). The qualification “unto death” is important here because death is not understood as just the same thing as not loving one’s ψυχή. Instead, death is the endpoint of a whole trajectory—although we must remember that it is paradoxically not the final endpoint given that we are meant to find our ψυχή again on the other side.

Across the New Testament, then, we see a consistent testimony that giving, laying down, or sharing one’s ψυχή is the very epitome of love. I have heard many sermons about love, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard this explained from the pulpit, and yet when we examine the emphatic language in the verses above and consider their sheer number, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is one of the central messages of the New Testament. I think it doesn’t make for regular sermon material simply because it is somewhat hard to wrap one’s head around. What is this foreign concept that we don’t exactly have a single word for in English? And what does it look like, in concrete terms, to give or lay down one’s ψυχή if it means more than simply dying for someone?

I think a good way to wrap our heads around what this looks like is to read the lives of the saints. Many saints are martyrs, of course, and I do not by any means want to downplay the enormity and nobility of such a death. But many of the saints were not martyrs, and yet their lives make vivid and tangible what it looks like to offer one’s whole self in love. One might consider, for example, the poverty and tender zeal of St. Francis or Mother Teresa’s care for the lepers of Calcutta. We should also consider the more hidden self-giving of contemplatives such as St. John of the Cross in their ecstatic love of God above all else.

What we see in these lives is not the extent of the material good they did for others. Perhaps a billionaire donor might be able to do more in some utilitarian calculus. What we see is how radically they gave themselves from their very depths, how radically they broke free from the confines of our habitual self-centeredness, how radically they found themselves again coming into the fullness of who they were meant to be all along.

Appendix of Passages

καὶ γὰρ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου οὐκ ἧλθεν διακονηθῆναι ἀλλὰ διακονῆσαι καὶ δοῦναι τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν.

For even¹ the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his ψυχή as a ransom in place of many.
(Mark 10:45)

Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός. ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλὸς τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ τίθησιν ὑπὲρ τῶν προβάτων.

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his ψυχή for the sake of the sheep.
(John 10:11)

…καὶ τὴν ψυχήν μου τίθημι ὑπὲρ τῶν προβάτων.

…And I am laying down my ψυχή for the sake of the sheep.
(John 10:15)

Διὰ τοῦτο με ὁ πατὴρ ἀγαπᾷ ὅτι ἐγὼ τίθημι τὴν ψυχὴν μου, ἵνα πάλιν λάβω αὐτήν. οὐδεις αἴρει αὐτὴν ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλ’ ἐγὼ τίθημι αὐτὴν ἀπ’ ἐμαυτοῦ. ἐξουσίαν ἔχω θεῖναι αὐτήν, καὶ ἐξουσίαν ἔχω πάλιν λαβεῖν αὐτήν· ταύτην τὴν ἐντολὴν ἔλαβον παρὰ τοῦ πατρός μου.

This is why the Father loves me: Because I am laying down my ψυχή in order that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I am laying it down from myself. I have the authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it up again. This is the commandment I received from my Father.
(John 10:17–18)

οὕτως ὁμειρόμενοι ὑμῶν εὐδοκοῦμεν μεταδοῦναι ὑμῖν οὐ μόνον τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ θεοῦ ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰς ἑαυτῶν ψυχάς, διότι ἀγαπητοὶ ἡμῖν ἐγενήθητε.

So, longing for you, we wanted to share with you not only the gospel of God but even our own ψυχαί because you became beloved to us.
(1 Thessalonians 2:8)

καὶ αὐτοὶ ἐνίκησαν αὐτὸν διὰ τὸ αἷμα τοῦ ἀρνίου καὶ διὰ τὸν λόγον τῆς μαρτυρίας αὐτῶν καὶ οὐκ ἠγάπησαν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτῶν ἄχρι θανάτου.

And they have conquered him through the blood of the Lamb and the account of their witness and did not love their ψυχή unto death.
(Revelation 12:11)

Matthew 20:28 has “just as” (ὥσπερ) instead, but is otherwise identical.↩︎

He Who Seeks to Save His Life

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Of all the many difficult sayings of Jesus, one in particular troubles my soul. Versions of it appear in all four gospels (Matthew 16:24–27, Mark 8:34–37, Luke 8:23–25, John 12:24–25), and I have been able to quote it since childhood. After years of meditation, however, I’m less and less confident that I know what Jesus means. For the sake of completeness, I will give both the full Greek and my own translation of Matthew’s version, which seems to be the most basic, but I will leave untranslated the critical word ψυχή (psyche) for reasons that will soon become apparent. I have indicated the variant readings found in Luke and Mark with footnotes and also included all the source passages in full in an appendix, although the only variant that will really matter for our purposes is the interesting alternative rendering of the last verse found in Luke and the very different version in John.

Τότε ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ· εἴ τις θέλει ὀπίσω μου ἐλθεῖν, ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν καὶ ἀράτω τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀκολουθείτω μοι. ὅς γὰρ ἐὰν θέλῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ σῶσαι ἀπολέσει αὐτὴν· ὅς δ’ ἄν ἀπολέσῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ εὑρήσει αὐτήν. τί γὰρ ὠφεληθήσεται ἄνθρωπος ἐὰν τὸν κόσμον ὅλον κερδήσῃ τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ζημιωθῇ; ἤ τί δώσει ἄνθρωπος ἀντάλλαγμα τῆς ψυχῆς αὐτοῦ;¹

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If someone wants to come² after me, let him deny³ himself and take up his cross⁴ and follow me. For if anyone⁵ wants to save his ψυχή he will lose it. But if anyone should lose⁶ his ψυχή for my sake,⁷ he will find⁸ it. For what is a man profited⁹ if he should gain the whole cosmos but suffer the loss of his ψυχή? Or what will a man give¹⁰ in exchange for his ψυχή?”

The central bit that I’m interested in here is the overtly paradoxical claim that someone who wants to save his ψυχή ends up losing it, while the one who loses it ends up saving it. This paradox must have been so striking to the gospel writers that it occurs separately again in both Matthew (10:39) and Luke (17:33), with slightly different verbs.

As usual, John’s version is rather different. Instead of prefacing the paradoxical saying with the importance of denying oneself and taking up one’s cross, John records the memorable image of a grain of wheat “dying” into the ground:

ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν μὴ ὁ κόκκος τοῦ σίτου πεσὼν εἰς τὴν γῆν ἀποθάνῃ, αὐτὸς μόνος μένει· ἐὰν δὲ ἀποθάνῃ, πολὺν καρπὸν φέρει. ὁ φιλῶν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἀπολλύει αὐτήν, καὶ ὁ μισῶν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ τούτῳ εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον φυλάξει αὐτήν.

Truly, truly I say to you, “Unless a grain of wheat, falling into the earth, dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. The one who loves his ψυχή loses it, and the one who hates his ψυχή in this cosmos guards it unto eternal life.”

Notice also that John’s version uses the language of “loving” and “hating” rather than the business verbs of “saving,” “losing,” “profiting,” “gaining,” and “suffering loss,” although Luke includes, separately, a version of the saying about taking up the cross immediately after the troubling saying that a follower must “hate” his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, “and even his own ψυχή” (ἔτι τε καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ἑαυτοῦ, 14:26).

So much for what I do understand: the literal words on the page. But even coming up with a literal translation of these words is tricky because of the critical word ψυχή. Although most Greek students will memorize this noun as “soul” on their flashcards, several translations render the word in this context as “life” (KJV, ESV, NASB, NIV, Douay-Rheims). In fact, I cannot find a single translation that renders the word as “soul” in the central verse.

In some ways, this is reasonable. In Homer, this word refers to a kind of life-force expressed in the breath or the blood. When a warrior dies, the ψυχή escapes through the mouth or his wounds. If we stick to this archaic meaning of the word, trying to “save your ψυχή” might mean desperately clinging onto this present life despite the inevitability of death and “finding it” might refer to the ultimate resurrection on the other side of the grave. Given that Jesus speaks about taking up the cross just before this in three of the gospels lends further support to this reading. He might be telling his disciples that if they merely try to stay alive as long as possible, bottling up their life-force-ψυχή, then they will lack the courage to face persecution and martyrdom. They might deny him in order to save their skins, thereby forfeiting life in the resurrection. Conversely, those who freely let their ψυχή flow out of their wounds on Roman crosses will recover ψυχή on the Last Day.

We can also read the last verse in this way too, but remarkably many translations (KJV, ESV, NASB, NIV, Douay-Rheims) switch to rendering ψυχή as “soul,” even though the whole logic of the passage depends on the identity of what is being discussed. Consider for a moment, however, what Jesus would be saying if we continue to read ψυχή as “life-force”: “What is a man profited if he should gain the whole cosmos but suffer the loss of his life? Or what will a man give in exchange for his life?” There’s a simple meaning here. In order for a person to enjoy anything at all, even the entire universe, he has to be around to enjoy it. If he’s dead, it can’t be of any benefit to him. Hence, it would be completely illogical for a person to trade away his very existence in exchange for something he thinks will benefit him.

There are several problems, however, with understanding ψυχή as mere existence or biological life.

First, and most obviously, the gospel writers didn’t speak Homeric Greek. Ordinary Greek in the first century did preserve many phrases in which ψυχή simply means a person’s life (see for example Matthew 2:20). The archaic meaning of the word had, however, for hundreds of years already, been supplanted by a much more complex set of philosophical and poetic meanings in most circumstances. Long before Plato and Aristotle, as early as the sixth century, ψυχή comes to mean the higher or concentrated aspect of human personality, superior to the body, and capable of surviving death. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament puts it this way:

In the period around and after 500 B.C. ψυχή is then commonly used as an omnibus term for human thought, will and emotion and also for the essential core of man which can be separated from his body and which does not share in the body’s dissolution. (s.v. A2)

In Pythagorean and Orphic circles, this immortal concentration of the person, can even be reincarnated in different forms of animal life as reward or punishment for deeds done as a human being.

In the poetic expression of the day, the ψυχή of something is the part that counts, it’s inner essence. For example, Isocrates says that “every government is the soul of a city” (πᾶσα πολιτεία ψυχή πόλεως; Panathenaicus, 138), and Aristotle says that “the story is, as it were, the soul of the tragedy” (οἷον ψυχὴ ὁ μῦθος τῆς τραγῳδίας; Poetics 1450a). This is very much like our poetic usage in English as when Shakespeare says, “Brevity is the soul of wit” (Hamlet 2.2).

Second, consider the separate instance of our paradox in Matthew 10:38–39. Just a few verses earlier in the same chapter, Jesus says, “Do not fear the one who destroys the body (σῶμα) but is not able to destroy the ψυχή. Instead fear the one who is able to destroy both the ψυχή and the body in Gehenna” (10:28). Notice that here the “destruction” of the ψυχή cannot be so easily understood as the loss of physical life because that is presumably what happens when just the body in destroyed in the first half of the sentence. Notice too that in this verse there is no hint of a positive redemption on the other side of the ψυχή being destroyed in Gehenna.

Third, and most importantly, consider the variant in Luke that I indicated was the only significant variant for our purposes. Instead of losing one’s soul, Luke speaks of losing one’s self (ἑαυτὸν ἀπολέσας) clearly understanding this as synonymous with the loss of the ψυχή. This echoes the language about taking up the cross in all three synoptic authors. Taking up our cross does not mean the biological death of crucifixion—which may, after all, be purely involuntary and passive as we see with the bad thief on Golgotha—but rather the active and continual effort of denying our very self (ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν), which is why, perhaps, Luke adds the phrase “daily.”

Although one might think an exhortation to martyrdom and the easy loss of biological life a hard saying enough, I believe Jesus is saying something even more difficult to receive. The one who seeks to preserve his very self ends up losing it, but the one who freely gives his self away ends up finding it. John’s version urges us even to hate the self, the core of our very person.

But now the real questions begin. What does it mean to “lose” or “hate” the self? At first glance, we might understand this as an exhortation toward radical altruism, a total abnegation of self-interested motives. Perhaps, even more radically, Jesus is pushing us toward something like a Buddhist extinction of our separable ego-identity.

In place of these appealing surface possibilities, however, we face a frustrating paradox. The whole exhortation is motivated precisely by a promise of life and profit for the ψυχή. If I’m supposed to seek to lose my self, why should I want to find it again? If I heed Christ’s warning, aren’t I trying to save my self? And if I do that, aren’t I trapped in the very thing he is warning against? If I truly hate my very self, why should I want to preserve it forever?

The whole exhortation is motivated precisely by an appeal to self-interest, and far from envisioning an ultimate ego-death at the pinnacle of spiritual achievement, the saying presupposes the intrinsic value of the self and the worth of preserving the self in the eschaton.

We can confirm this reading by appealing to other passages where the destruction of the ψυχή is unmistakably bad when carried out by others. For example, in Mark 3:4 Jesus asks the Pharisees whether it is lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, “to save ψυχή or destroy it,” with the implication being that their strict adherence to the sabbath laws would require the destruction of ψυχή by forbidding him to heal a man’s shriveled hand (notice that the man’s life is not at stake). Christ is hardly urging us, therefore, to go out and try to oppose ψυχή as such, as though the ψυχή itself were something evil.

What is being urged is not the loss of the ψυχή simpliciter but the abandonment of a certain reflexive attitude toward oneself that thwarts the flourishing of the very thing it seeks to preserve. A child caught in a Chinese finger-trap naturally wants to escape, but his efforts at escape are the very thing that causes the trap to tighten. We might instruct the child to relax and not try so hard to pull his fingers out, but this doesn’t mean that he should just give up and accept forever his trapped condition. Instead, he must discover that the only way to pull his fingers out is paradoxically to push them in.

What, then, does this look like? In concrete terms, how do I pull my soul out of the Chinese finger-trap of self-seeking—while still being motivated to ultimately “guard it unto eternal life”? That’s what troubles my soul. I don’t know how to hate my ψυχή “in this cosmos,” while maintaining it’s ultimate value and identity.

I’m pretty sure the right answer is just the one word: “love.” But then again, I don’t really understand what this means either.

In the next essay, I will explore a similar range of passages from the New Testament that speak of love as the gift or sacrifice of the ψυχή, and I will similarly argue that “laying down one’s life” is not quite an adequate translation. Perhaps this investigation will bring us closer to answers, but even with all the scholarly questions answered, I’m afraid we will still be left with the existential question, which is perhaps the question of life: How do I give away my ψυχή fully in love?

Appendix of Passages

καὶ ὅς οὐ λαμβάνει τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀκολουθεῖ ὀπίσω μου, οὐκ ἔστιν μου ἄξιος· ὁ εὑρὼν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἀπολέσει αὐτήν, καὶ ὁ ἀπολέσας τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ εὑρήσει αὐτήν.

And he who does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. He who finds his ψυχή will lose it, and whoever loses his ψυχή for my sake will find it.
(Matthew 10:38–39)

Τότε ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ· εἴ τις θέλει ὀπίσω μου ἐλθεῖν, ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν καὶ ἀράτω τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀκολουθείτω μοι. ὅς γὰρ ἐὰν θέλῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ σῶσαι ἀπολέσει αὐτὴν· ὅς δ’ ἄν ἀπολέσῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ εὑρήσει αὐτήν. τί γὰρ ὠφεληθήσεται ἄνθρωπος ἐὰν τὸν κόσμον ὅλον κερδήσῃ τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ζημιωθῇ; ἤ τί δώσει ἄνθρωπος ἀντάλλαγμα τῆς ψυχῆς αὐτοῦ;

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If someone wants to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For if anyone wants to save his ψυχή he will lose it. But if anyone should lose his ψυχή for my sake, he will find it. For what is a man profited if he should gain the whole cosmos but suffer the loss of his ψυχή? Or what will a man give in exchange for his ψυχή?”
(Matthew 16:24–27)

Καὶ προσκαλεσάμενος τὸν ὄχλον σὺν τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· εἴ τις θέλει ὀπίσω μου ἀκολουθεῖν, ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν καὶ ἀράτω τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀκολουθείτω μοι. ὅς γὰρ ἐὰν θέλῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ σῶσαι ἀπολέσει αὐτὴν· ὅς δ’ ἄν ἀπολέσει τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ καὶ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου εὑρήσει αὐτήν. τί γὰρ ὠφελεῖ ἄνθρωπον κερδῆσαι τὸν κόσμον ὅλον καὶ ζημιωθῆναι τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ; τί γὰρ δοῖ ἄνθρωπος ἀντάλλαγμα τῆς ψυχῆς αὐτοῦ;

And calling the crowd together with his disciples he said to them, “If someone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself ἑαυτὸν) and take up his cross and follow me. For if anyone wants to save his ψυχή he will lose it, but if anyone loses his ψυχή for my sake and [that] of the gospel’s he will find it. For what does it benefit a man to gain the whole cosmos and lose his ψυχή? For what would a man give in exchange for his ψυχή?”
(Mark 8:34–37)

Ἔλεγεν δὲ πρὸς πάντας· εἴ τις θέλει ὀπίσω μου ἔρχεσθαι, ἀρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν καὶ ἀράτω τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ καθ’ ἡμέραν καὶ ἀκολουθείτω μοι. ὅς γὰρ ἄν θέλῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ σῶσαι ἀπολέσει αὐτήν· ὅς δ’ ἂν ἀπολέσῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ οὗτος σώσει αὐτήν. τί γὰρ ὠφελεῖται ἄνθρωπος κερδήσας τὸν κόσμον ὅλον ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἀπολέσας ἢ ζήμιωθείς;

And he said to all, “If someone wants to come after me, let him deny himself (ἑαυτὸν) and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his ψυχή will lose it, but whoever will lose his ψυχή for my sake, that one will save it. For what is a man benefited who gains the whole cosmos but loses himself (ἑαυτὸν) or is lost.”
(Luke 8:23–25)

ὅς ἐάν ζητήσῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ περιποιήσασθαι ἀπολέσει αὐτήν, ὅς δ΄ ἂν ἀπολέσῃ ζῳογονήσει αὐτήν.

Whoever seeks to save up his ψυχή loses it, but whoever loses [it] keeps it alive.
(Luke 17:33)

ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν μὴ ὁ κόκκος τοῦ σίτου πεσὼν εἰς τὴν γῆν ἀποθάνῃ, αὐτὸς μόνος μένει· ἐὰν δὲ ἀποθάνῃ, πολὺν καρπὸν φέρει. ὁ φιλῶν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἀπολλύει αὐτήν, καὶ ὁ μισῶν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ τούτῳ εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον φυλάξει αὐτήν.

Truly, truly I say to you, “Unless a grain of wheat, falling into the earth, dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. The one who loves his ψυχή loses it, and the one who hates his ψυχή in this cosmos guards it unto eternal life.”
(John 12:24–25)

All Greek text is from the Nestle-Aland 27th edition (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).↩︎
Mark has “follow” (ἀκολουθεῖν) instead, while Luke has a different verb for “come” (ἔρχεσθαι).↩︎
Luke has the version of this verb without the prefix (ἀρνησάσθω).↩︎
Luke adds “daily” (καθ’ ἡμέραν).↩︎
Luke omits the “if,” i.e. “whoever wants…”↩︎
Mark makes this verb future indicative (ἀπολέσει) rather than aorist subjunctive.↩︎
Mark adds “and [that] of the gospel’s” (καὶ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου).↩︎
Luke reads “that one will save” (οὗτος σώσει).↩︎
Mark reads, “what does it profit a man” (τί γὰρ ὠφελεῖ ἄνθρωπον) followed by infinitives depending on the active verb rather than the “if” construction. Luke has a slightly different rendering, which for our purposes may be the only significant variant: “gaining the whole world he loses himself or is lost” (κερδήσας τὸν κόσμον ὅλον ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἀπολέσας ἢ ζήμιωθείς).↩︎
Mark has an aorist subjunctive (δοῖ) rather than future for “give.” Luke lacks this whole sentence.↩︎

Escaping Advertisement

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Several weeks ago, I wrote a rather gloomy essay about the feeling of being trapped in the contemporary marketing machine. After a recent conversation, however, I started to realized just how good I have it and just how practically possible it is to emancipate oneself from the tyranny of the attention economy.

In this recent conversation, both my wife and I realize how unusual it is that neither of us had watched a single advertisement for the upcoming election—not one. We’ve seen a few bumper stickers and yard signs while we are driving, of course, but we haven’t watched a single video or listened to a single audio clip.

This made us realize that it has been months, at least, since we have seen any kind of video commercial and several years since advertising jingles were regularly stuck in our heads. I have no idea what flavors of Doritos are current or what demonstrable improvements have been made by Tide over its competitors. I have not been able to eliminate the billboards from my eyesight as I drive down the highway—much to my resentment—but I admit that if this is the most annoying intrusion into the sanctuary of my daily aesthetic experience, I’m doing fairly well.

How do we manage this oasis in the midst of such vast tracts of vulgar product-hawking? Well, for starters, we never have owned a television or subscribed to cable. We have, at times subscribed to various streaming services, but we have done so less and less over the years and we never opt for the advertisement option. I would much rather simply unsubscribe than subject my time and taste to such grotesqueries. We don’t listen to the radio, and for music I have set up a home server onto which I have loaded my collection of jazz and classical CDs. I can still stream from anywhere on all my devices, but I own my own turf. For YouTube, we use the Brave browser which blocks the advertisements automatically, and it’s been many months since I’ve engaged with any other social media.

In our home, we have eliminated, as far as we can, the clashing colors of commercial packaging. We have many glass jars with neat labels into which we empty flour, pretzels, coffee beans, or detergent. Many consumables come in packaging with labels that are easy to remove and can easily be identified without them: peanut butter, Parmesan cheese, or shampoo, for instance. If there are necessary objects with branding that cannot be easily removed (or are generally made of ugly plastic), we do our best to hide them out of sight in closets or cabinets.

We refuse, especially, to make our bodies into billboards. We do not wear t-shirts with slogans, brand-names, lame jokes, wolves howling at the moon, band tours, or inspiring verbs. I avoid all clothing with a visible logo or writing of any kind, and my wife refuses to carry a handbag with a gaudy, fake-gold clasp in the shape of some brand logo that sells the illusion of status to lower-middle-class dupes.

We do not do all this on political or ethical grounds. (I’m rather in favor of a market economy.) Rather, we have eliminated all this from our lives purely out of annoyance at the imposition of ugliness into our daily experience.

The result is an aesthetic world composed on our terms. After all, as the owners of the house and the objects in it, why should we pay for the dubious privilege of bearing someone else’s branding? We try to make our home as harmonious and composed as possible, so that the vast majority of the time, what presents itself to our senses is a coherent array of colors, shapes, and symbols all bearing the impress of our family’s taste and personality.

Occasionally—very occasionally—the graphic designers for companies do produce aesthetically pleasing and tasteful branding, but even so, the branding for one company can hardly hope to harmonize with the branding of all the others. If you fill your life with branding and advertisement, the only possible result will be a cacophonous war of colors and messaging, each vying to elbow out its neighbors in the contest for your eyeballs.

What shocks me is how few of our friends have done likewise. I suspect they just don’t know how easy it is to live like this. After all, nine out of the ten things I mentioned above involve simply refraining from spending time and money on things most of us regret anyway. The only thing that involves a modicum of effort is the removal of labels when we bring items home from the grocery.

I also suspect that they are so acclimated to the culture of ugliness that they are not sufficiently annoyed to take even minimal action. For example, everyone hates YouTube ads, but I am surprised how few of my friends have taken the thirty seconds it requires to look up “How do I block YouTube ads?”

There’s much ink being spilled these days on the tyrannies of modern life, social media, or “late-stage capitalism,” but every time I read such complaints, I think about how strange these tyrannies are. In developed Western countries we are not being forced to do anything at gunpoint, and there are no secret police breaking down anyone’s door. Admittedly, there have been some shocking exceptions to that generalization, but their status as shocking exceptions proves my point. Although many modern ills are so embedded in our systems that opting out would involve pretty extreme measures—try getting on without email—many of the things that people complain of are things from which they could easily walk away with just a little reflection and will power. And how tyrannical can a tyranny be if you can just say, “No, thank you.”

The real tyranny, I suspect, is the one inside our own minds that keeps us from ever even thinking of opting out.

Levels of Knowledge

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

In a previous essay, I suggested that the difference between sensibles and intelligibles is not so much a matter of the material versus the immaterial but a matter of distinct modes of consciousness by which we access different kinds of reality. We grasp sensibles with our senses, but we grasp intelligibles with our intelligence. According to Plato, this leads to a categorical distinction between the kinds of knowledge that we can have of these different kinds of reality. We need to look closely at the Greek vocabulary here and the standard translations of these words because students often misunderstand this distinction.

On the sensory side of this distinction, we have the Greek word δόξα (doxa). This noun is related to the verb δοκεῖν which means, “to seem,” or “to appear.” This is how sensibles show up in our experience. They seem a certain way at a particular time, from a particular angle. I look out my window, for example, and I see the dark green of late summer maple leaves rustling gently in the wind. The color seems, right now, a little dim since the sun is low in the sky and is obscured by thin clouds. As the hours of the morning pass, however, the green awakens into the full light of day. My memory stitches all these seemings together so that I do not perceive the trees as changing color but rather as revealing their true color more fully under different lights. As I walk from my building to where the high school classes are held, I see these same trees from different angles by the path. Their bark seems to have a rougher texture up close, it seems dusty to the brush of my fingertips, and I smell in the air the subtle green hints of living wood.

Such seemings are the only way for me to experience these trees. They do not show up to my consciousness at all without seeming one way or another. I recognize, however, a gap between the way the tree seems to me and the way the tree must be in itself. At any given moment, I only see one side of the tree, but I realize that it has a backside. I can walk around and see this other side easily enough, but when I do this, only that side seems to me, and the immediate seeming of the other side is lost, only to be held in memory. Hence, from a plurality of momentary seemings reinforcing each other, correcting each other, and fleshing out a fuller picture we form some conception of the sensible object’s features. No matter how much we examine the tree, however, further inspection can always reveal more that we had not previously seen. Hence, we come to recognize that all knowledge based on seeming is always from a particular perspective, bound to particular moments, under particular conditions, always falling short of completeness.

So far, I have avoided translating the noun δόξα at all, relying instead on its verbal cousin. Traditionally, in the context of Plato, this word has been translated as “opinion” in contrast to “knowledge,” but it is strange in English to call the convictions I have about the tree mere “opinion”—as though they were akin to my political views. When I touch the tree and feel the dusty texture of its gray bark, I would never say that I have an “opinion” about how it feels. As far as I am concerned, the texture of the bark is an immediate fact, and we would ordinarily say that I “know” this fact.

Nevertheless, it is, admittedly, knowledge of a certain kind, knowledge rooted very much in the here-and-now appearance of this particular tree to me. As much as I try to communicate what I have learned, another person cannot have this same kind of knowledge without similarly touching the tree for himself. The here-and-nowness of such knowledge, in fact, is precisely what gives it firmness and strength. The more it recedes into the distance of memory or the vagueness of second-hand communication, the less we are inclined to call it knowledge at all.

The trouble is that English lacks a word for this. We have the verbs “to appear” or “to seem,” and we have nouns on the object side such as “appearance.” But what do we call the subjective state in us that results from such appearances? Whatever we call it in English, that’s what δόξα means in Greek: the state we’re in when something appears to us a particular way. “Experience,” “observation,” and “perception” come pretty close, but they are all too general and fail to make explicit the way that δόξα is the result of something “seeming” a certain way. So perhaps the best we can do is to translate δόξα with phrases such as “appearance-based-knowledge” or “knowledge-gained-through-sensation”—or we could just translate it as doxa and leave it at that.

On the intelligible side of our initial distinction, we have the Greek word ἐπιστήμη (episteme). From this word, we have the whole branch of philosophy that we call “epistemology.” Traditionally, ἐπιστήμη has been translated as “knowledge,” and from this translation, the idea has been popularized that Plato thinks we can only have real knowledge when it comes to the Forms, denying categorically any knowledge of ordinary things. That way of putting it, however, misses the point. Plato would be the last person to deny my real experience of the beautiful maple trees. Instead, he’s simply pointing out a fundamental distinction in the way that I know those particular trees and the way that I know truths about Equality (to take our example from the last essay).

When I think about Equality, I understand certain truths about it. For example, I understand that if A is equal to B, then B must also be equal to A. That is, Equality is necessarily a reciprocal relation. I understand that if A is equal to B and B is equal to C, then A must also be equal to C. That is, Equality is necessarily a transitive relation. I understand that half of A is equal to half of B, that twice A is equal to twice B, and so on for any quantitative modification I care to make. What is more, I understand that these truths don’t just apply to one or two cases of Equality that I happen to experience, but to any case of Equality anywhere in the universe at any time. If these truths failed to apply to some particular case, it just wouldn’t be a case of Equality. And it’s not just me. I understand that any being capable of understanding Equality must also come to the same conclusions. My understanding of Equality, then, is not a seeming at all. By understanding Equality, I grasp something independent of perspective, appearance, time, or place. Hence, the kind of knowledge that I have has a kind of stability, certainty, and completeness that doxa lacks.

For now, rather than saying that Plato relegates “knowledge” to the realm of “ideas,” which is misleading at best, I suggest that we simply leave these two Greek words untranslated. With this explanation in hand, we will know that doxa refers to appearance-based-knowledge while episteme refers to intelligence-based-knowledge. We will need to divide these two categories into further distinctions as we go, but for now, we can organize what we have learned into the following chart:

Kind of Object	Mode of Existence	Mode of Knowledge
Intelligible	Being	Episteme
Sensible	Becoming	Doxa

Alain Delon and the Beauty of Evil

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

A few months ago, I went to a screening of Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic Le Samuraï (1967), starring a young Alain Delon. No one could have known at the time of the screening that Delon would pass away just a few weeks later on the 18th of August at the age of 88. Since then, I have watched several of his films, and collectively they trouble my soul with many questions about the relationship between evil and beauty. It’s beginning to disturb my Platonic sleep.

Delon is consistently described by the critics as “beautiful” rather than “handsome,” and this is just the right word, although you would be quite mistaken if you thought this suggested anything soft or effeminate. His is a dangerous, crystalline beauty that attracts at the very moment that it resists approach. His famous blue eyes suggest something of the predatory animal, a panther or a bird of prey: steady, intelligent, cold, at times regal, always lethal.

In many of his roles, Delon’s deadly beauty is cast to good effect. In his breakout role, for example, he starred in Plein Soleil (1960), the French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Delon’s character, Tom Ripley plays a pathological liar who has conned his way into the society of the wealthy and handsome Dickie Greenleaf (called Philippe in the French version) as Greenleaf idles around in Italy. The conniving and envious Ripley, early in the film, sneaks on Greenleaf’s fine clothes, using his hairbrush, and whispering the things Greenleaf says to his fiancée, Marge, all while admiring himself in the mirror. Eventually, while they are out sailing on the utopian waters of the Mediterranean, Ripley kills Greenleaf and assumes his identity, even using his typewriter and signature to withdraw enormous sums from his bank account.

I prefer the French title Plein Soleil to the usual translation Purple Noon because it communicates the way that a strong Mediterranean sun saturates every scene of the film even—perhaps especially—when Ripley dumps the body of a man he has just killed over a wall in the dead of night. Throughout the film, one never forgets the full, cloudless sun shining straight down on a white yacht sailing over blue waters, while rich, beautiful people lounge and tan, argue and murder on its deck. Like Oedipus the King, Apollo is an offstage character in the drama.

In Le Samuraï, Delon plays a careful, punctilious assassin named Jef Costello, who puts on white gloves before shooting his victims. The film opens with a long, wordless sequence in which we watch him wake up in an austere Paris apartment, don a trench coat, steal a classy car, set up a complex alibi, walk into a moody jazz lounge, slip into a back office, put on his white gloves, and at point blank, execute his target.

The photography, directed by the true artist Henri Decaë, maintains a consistent palette of cool, high-contrast blues, grays, blacks, and whites creating a color version of the film noir aesthetic. It conveys the sterile elegance of the quiet killer, as though Delon’s blue eyes, dark hair, and impossibly immaculate pale face imposed themselves by the sheer force of their perfection on the colors of the whole world.

Writing about Delon and the photography of Decaë, Sarah Imogen Smith remarks “how easily moral compasses can be deranged by the magnetism of beauty.”¹ In many noir films, she observes that we are drawn to cool killers. It’s more complicated than realizing that a bad man might have a pretty face. The whole aesthetic of such films, the particular brand of “cool” that they display, has everything to do with the badness of the characters. Sometimes the characters do have redeeming qualities, but we wouldn’t be attracted to them in the same way if they weren’t bad to begin with.

In Monsieur Klein (1976), a slightly older Delon plays a wealthy art dealer, the titular Robert Klein, in the middle of German-occupied Paris. Early in the film, we find this man in a silk bathrobe lounging at home in an apartment packed with opulent aesthetic objects: bronze sculptures on every table, rare paintings in front of tapestry-covered walls. The dramatic action starts when Klein buys an Old Dutch Master painting for far less than it is worth from a Jewish man who is desperate to raise what money he can in order to flee France. Again, beauty is mixed with evil, and not mixed in an accidental way, but mixed in such a way that beauty is directly implicated in Monsieur Klein’s crime.

These films touch a deep anxiety about beauty because, if they speak the whole truth, they threaten the alliance between the Beautiful and the Good. It is sometimes said that Baudelaire was the first great artist to champion the aesthetics of evil and that his Les Fleurs du mal are meant to show us little vignettes of depravity that are supposed to be beautiful not in spite of the depravity but because of it. To a Platonist like me, who believes that the beautiful in its very essence is the manifestation of the good, such an idea is not just scandalous or shocking—it’s metaphysically impossible.

Perhaps the anxiety runs deeper, however. Perhaps it’s not just possible for some particular evil things to be beautiful in their evil. Perhaps, more shocking still, all beautiful things are evil in their beauty. Perhaps the beautiful itself is something corrupt, an alluring counterfeit of the good, always dressed up like Lady Macbeth in royal finery but rubbing and rubbing bloody hands that will never be clean.

Not so subtly in the background behind this line of thinking is an association between beauty and wealth. Money acts as a middle term between beauty and evil so that beautiful equals rich and rich equals evil. In Plein Soleil, the yacht, the fine clothes, the lavish hotel rooms all drive Tom Ripley’s covetous pathology. In Monsieur Klein, the aesthete’s apartment comes from a covenant with Mammon. In Le Samuraï, although the bare apartment stands in stark contrast to that of Monsieur Klein, the whole plot revolves around a large sum that a cabal of mysterious elite is paying to have somebody killed.

Such a linkage between beauty, wealth, and evil is especially appealing to those who view the world primarily in terms of class struggle. The rich guys are the bad guys and they have nice things. The poor guys are the good guys who have ugly things. Hence we have the spectacle of middle-class kids who want to look like revolutionaries intentionally tearing up their clothes and disfiguring their hair. The irony, of course, is that the rich are thought to be evil primarily because they keep the nice things for themselves rather than sharing them with the poor, who actually do want these things and hence, by their own logic and desires, affirm the goodness of material beauty.

The condemnation of beauty is much worse when it goes from this-worldly politics to other-worldly religion. A certain type of dour-face ascetic spirituality has always been found in the heretical sects of most faiths. It seems to be one of a few basic configurations of attitude that show up again and again in totally different traditions, and its adherents tend to have a recognizable personality type. Although it’s impossible to say, I wonder whether people of such a personality tend to adopt this kind of religion or whether the adoption of such a religion tends to distort people’s personality into the type. I suspect it’s a bit of both, but either way, these people end up pretty sad.

According to the dour-faced religion, beautiful things are always suspicious. Beautiful possessions, like those of Monsieur Klein, are the sign of ill-gotten gains. A beautiful face, like that of Tom Ripley, is the sign of a frozen heart. Inverting the same logic, the Good must always be ugly. If something is hard and unpleasant, it must be good precisely because it does not attract our worldly desires. The more ugly something is, the better it must be.

Such a view leans heavily on the contrast between seeming and being. We all know that appearances can be deceptive and that Delon’s pretty face and winsome smile might conceal murderous intent. But the dour-face folks take the appearance of something as conclusive evidence that the substantial core underneath must be rotten. Beautiful appearances—just because they are beautiful—are always evil, and therefore a good core must always come with an ugly appearance.

In defense against all these accusers of beauty, I call to witness one of my heroes, Hans Urs von Balthasar:

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and be banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.

What vengeance will beauty exact if we turn our backs on her as an enemy of the good?

We can be sure that whoever sneers at [Beauty’s] name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.²

The cheap way to rescue ourselves and restore the alliance between the beautiful and the good would simply be to deny the beauty of Delon, his films, and the characters he plays. We might say that such things are “merely pretty” and that “true” beauty lies elsewhere. But such a move would betray the very foundations of our relationship to beauty. It would deny the manifest evidence of our experience—it’s just a fact that the films are full of beauty—and the very essence of beauty lies in its manifestation. To deny the manifestly beautiful and pretend instead that some secret, invisible beauty is the true beauty amounts to denying the reality of beauty altogether.

Instead, I think we must take a more difficult path. We must acknowledge the beauty of evil things but guard against—at the risk of our souls—Baudelaire’s error that evil things are beautiful because they are evil. Instead, evil things may be beautiful in spite of their evil, and insofar as they are beautiful, the beauty itself is good. In simple cases, the two are related accidentally. A murderer has lovely blue eyes. So what? The eyes by themselves are beautiful and this is good. The man is a murder and this is evil. The two facts are unrelated except that they happen to be facts about the same man. In the more complex cases like those of Delon’s films, however, we must say more.

Here, the situation is more like that of a clever lie. The lies that work, of course, are those that contain some truth. The more truth they contain and the more closely intertwined the lie is with the truthful core, the more effective the lie becomes. Recognizing that something is a lie, we would be gravely mistaken if we rejected wholesale the truth it contained or even downplayed the truthfulness of the truth because it was bound up cleverly in a lie. This remains so even when we have difficulty untangling the threads of the lie from the threads of the truth. Similarly, I think we must acknowledge that there really is something fine about the objects in Monsieur Klein’s apartment even though they were purchased with blood money and in the context are collectively a symbol of decadence. We must acknowledge that there really is a compelling power in the disciplined lethality of Costello even if that lethality is deployed in the service of an evil cabal.

We must be careful, however, because, even though beauty manifests itself, our capacity to judge beauty is not infallible, much less our capacity to sort out good from evil in complex cases. So perhaps it’s good that our sleep should be troubled, at least a little.

Imogen Sara Smith, “The Beautiful Crimes of Henri Decaë,” Current, December 2017.↩︎
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, trans. Johannes Verlage, vol. 1 (Ignatius; Crossroads, 2009), 18.↩︎

Being and Becoming

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Previously, we have discussed the differences between sensibles and intelligibles, using the example of Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debbie.” Individual performances of this song are “sensibles,” while the song itself, the deep structure that remains the same across multiple performances, is an “intelligible.” In the last essay, we examined the way that Plato uses the terms εἶδος and ἴδεα to refer to this shared structure or “character” that undergirds similarity across differences, and we ended by puzzling about the mode of existence that such structures might have if they are not physical objects that we can poke or kick. To answer this puzzle, let’s begin with the kind of geometric example that Plato uses in the Meno and the Phaedo, before attempting to tackle the thornier issues raised by “Waltz for Debbie.”

Suppose I see two sticks of equal length. As in the other cases of intelligibility that we have examined, when I see such sticks, I am doing something with my mind, not just with my eyeballs. I am recognizing a pattern, the deep structure that we call “Equality,” or if we are speaking Greeklish, “the Equal.” I look again at two baskets each containing five apples. Although this case is a little different, being an equal count rather than an equal length, I nevertheless recognize that one and the same deep structure has shown up again.

We can immediately realize that this Equality that we recognize exists in a wholly different way from the sticks and the apples. Both are “real” in the sense that they are objective features of the world rather than things we make up within our own minds, but we usually think that the sticks and the apples are more “real” than Equality in the sense that we can pick them up, handle them, use them as food to fill our bellies, as fuel to warm our hands, or as weapons that cause pain.

In yet another sense, however, Equality is something more real than the sticks and the apples. Equality has a kind of permanence and invariability that the sticks and the apples can never achieve. After its flower falls and the remaining bud swells, an apple comes into existence in the course of some particular spring. It slowly ripens, reaches a point of perfect maturity, and begins its decline into decay. Eventually, if it goes uneaten, it becomes the soil for future apples and no longer exists as an apple at all. Equality, by contrast, did not begin one day, it does not ripen or decay, and even in a billion years, it will be just the same as it ever was. Even saying “will be” and “was” are not quite the right words because the structure of Equality simply is what it is and past and future are simply irrelevant. Equality is incompatible with More and Less. Equality is quantitative. Equality is a reciprocal relation. The “is” in these statements is not the “is” of the present moment, but the “is” of timeless truth. It isn’t that Equality has always existed but rather that the very categories of before and after, creation and destruction, growth, change, and decay, simply do not apply.

To express the difference between these two totally distinct ways of existing, Plato used the terms “being” (εἶναι) and “becoming” (γίγνεσθαι). Equality simply “is” what it is, always expressed with the present tense of the verb “to be.” Apples, by contrast, must “become” what they are before passing away. In fact, even the expression, “what it is” does not really apply to the apple. As both Parmenides and Heraclitus observed from their opposite perspectives before Plato, there is never any single moment when the apple fully is what it is. For any given second, the apple only realizes a thin bit of its total life. You might catch it while still green, but at that moment, you would miss what it is to be a ripe apple or a decaying apple. You might catch it at the very moment of perfect ripeness, but even if this is the best moment, the fullest moment, in the life of an apple, you would be missing the stage of green growth which is also an essential part of what it means to be an apple. All these moments—and not just in the life of this one apple but in all the apples in all the world—are expressions of what it is to be an apple. From moment to moment it is “becoming” itself, rolling out its existence until there is nothing left to roll. And so it is with everything in time. Even the comparatively more sturdy life of mountains or glaciers cannot lay claim to the timeless present of the verb “to be.” Instead, they merely “become” themselves more slowly. Plato calls such things “the things that become” (τὰ γενόμενα) in contrast to “the things that are” (τὰ ὄντα). Again doing a little violence to English, we might translate these phrases as “becomings” and “beings.”

Granting the timelessness of mathematical structures like Equality, we might well ask whether the same things can be said about “Waltz for Debbie.” Clearly, the individual performance of the song, the sensible instance, has a momentary existence bound in time. Indeed, the performance of a song is a wonderfully illustrative example of becoming since a song cannot be a song if we freeze it at some particular moment or take only one chord. Try pressing pause on your stereo, and you will have no music at all. By it’s very nature, the performance can only exist as something unfolding. The very condition of its life is mortality, living precisely by dying in the act. By contrast, the song itself, the intelligible structure underlying all the performances, the thing that can be written down as notes on a page, lacks this momentary temporality. From Friday’s performance to Saturday’s performance, the song is just the same. Even in a thousand years, some archeological musician might dig up the tune and play it again. In this way, we might think of the song itself as a timeless intelligible structure in the same way as Equality.

A difficulty arises at this point, however, a difficulty about which the students of Platonism have debated and sometimes taken different views. “Waltz for Debbie” was written by Bill Evans, and we might plausibly think that it depends for its very existence on him. An enterprising biographer might even date the particular day and hour on which it was composed. Unlike a sensible object, this intelligible sequence of notes may not exist at any particular place and time and it certainly doesn’t exist only in Evans’ head since it continues on long after his death. Nevertheless, we might think that it only comes into existence through his creative effort. In the literature, such cases are known as “Forms of artifacts,” i.e. intelligible structures not found in nature that seem to depend on human creativity. In the Republic, Plato mentions Forms for beds and tables (596b), and this caused his students in later years much material for perplexity and ingenious commentary.

Putting to one side the scholarly question of what Plato really meant, I think we can, with a little nuance, give a solid answer to the underlying metaphysical question. I read somewhere that someone had written a little computer script to generate every possible eight-bar melody playable on a piano. They stored all these possible melodies as MIDI files on a single flash drive. Of course, the collection is rather useless since discovering the good melodies among all those myriad possibilities would take exactly the same kind of genius as composing them in the first place. As any mathematician or programmer can tell, the program has not really created anything. All it has done is make explicit for us the truth that the very structure of Western musical scales already contains within itself all the possible eight-bar melodies that there ever could be. In the same way, the pixels on your computer monitor already contain within their very structure all the possible images you will ever see on it. The composer does not so much create these melodies as find them and bring them to manifestation out of the great ocean of possibility contained in the scale itself.

The program only works, of course, by limiting the sequence of generated notes to eight bars and only allowing the notes playable on an ordinary piano. If we removed these constraints, allowing any note on any instrument, for any length, at any level of volume, the range of possibilities explodes to an uncountable infinity. Nevertheless, the uncountable infinity of possibility is precontained within the very structure of Western Music, from which the composer draws out this one particular arrangement.

One might object that I am still limiting the possibilities to “Western” music, which has a history, came into existence over the course of particular centuries, and is itself the product of human creativity even if it is the collective creativity of a whole civilization rather than that of a single composer. This objection, however, is just repeating at a higher level the same issues as those involved in the composition of a single song—and the answer is just the same. “Western Music” is itself an intelligible structure vastly more complex (and from another angle vastly more simple) than the structure of a single song, but it is one of the possible structures precontained in the very nature of Sound. Human creativity did not produce this whole system of music ex nihilo, but instead drew forth and made manifest one possible way of making music that has always existed latent in the very structure of Sound. And “Sound,” in turn, is simply one of the possibilities precontained in the very physics of waves.

This is not to slight the genuine creativity of human genius. The chords we hear at the beginning of “Waltz for Debbie” owe their manifestation entirely to Evans. Granting that “Waltz for Debbie” has a kind of latent timeless existence hidden within the very laws of physics, those particular chords would never have been played in that sequence if not for Evans. The bringing to manifestation, the actualization of this intelligible structure depends on the creative genius of Evans’ mind. Hence, mind plays a crucial bridge role in this whole picture. On the one hand, the mind of Evans apprehended one possible way of arranging sounds out of all the possible notes that he could play and saw that it was good. On the other hand, the mind of Evans directed the playing of that pattern on a concrete piano, drawing out into sensible space and time the intelligible structure that he had grasped.

This gives us some hint toward a solution to a key question in Platonism, the “problem of instantiation.” Why should some intelligible structures become instantiated in sensible, temporal reality rather than others? Why should this intelligible become instantiated here and now? This technical question is related to the broader philosophical questions, “Why should things be ordered? Why do we live in a cosmos rather than sheer chaos? Where did order come from?” The hint we have here is that Mind (Νοῦς) is responsible for bridging from intelligibility to sensibility. This is clearly true for the products of human creativity, but what of nature? Could there be non-human minds or a single Divine Mind responsible for the ordering that we see in the non-human world? The answers to those questions, however, will have to wait for another essay.

Reverence (a Poem)

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The yellow brass of the old candlestick
Reflects the dirty window’s cloudy sun.
The candle wax a blue of robin’s egg
Or daylight sky that softens into dusk.
The artless colors catch and hold the eye,
A pair unsought like sudden lovers wed.
A pressure dark, a force unnamed, a tide
That pulls and pulls is pulling here again.

One calls it “Beauty” true enough,
But saying so will make the moment said,
And so disturb the dust that settles here
Like gray upon the head or wisdom on
The soul that dare not speak of sacred things.

It’s better not to name the thing at all,
To leave the world to thicken in its bones.
The light itself then alters in its way,
No brighter than the light that was before,
But now with weight like paint that’s brushed on strong.
All grows and grows and crests and goes away,
And if it goes unlooked at then it goes,
Unloved, unknown, and so without its gift,
And poorer I would be until again,
Some other window’s light some other day,
Reveals the secret to a waiting eye.

Eidos in the Meno and Euthyphro

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0400

In the last essay, we discussed the difficulties with the Greek words that are often translated as “form” and why we should resist the temptation to reify “the Forms” into a class of super-objects in a distant heaven somewhere. Instead, I argued that we could translate the synonyms εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea) as the “look” or “character” of something that allows us to mentally grasp what something is, i.e. its peculiar style of being.

I mentioned that, despite so much talk about “Plato’s Theory of the Forms,” he rarely uses these words and he never straight-forwardly gives us a theory in any dialogue. Nevertheless, he does occasionally use these terms, and in this essay, we will examine two critical passages from relatively early dialogues in which he does so.

Such early dialogues are often called “Socratic” dialogues because they feature Socrates as the main character and engage in a typically Socratic style of question-and-answer refutation. Unlike the portrayal of Socrates in later dialogues, this version of Socrates does not claim to know the answers to his questions. Instead, by drawing out what his interlocutors claim to know he shows them, through their own inability and self-contradiction, that they don’t have the answers they thought they did at the beginning.

These Socratic dialogues always begin from a basic “What is X?” type of question. Aristotle tells us that philosophers before Socrates tended to focus on “naturalistic” themes such as the nature of the physical elements or the origin of the cosmos. By contrast, Aristotle says, Socrates turned away from “things concerning the whole of nature” to “moral matters” (Met. Α, 987b1–4). Hence, these dialogues focus on questions such as “What is friendship?” or “What is courage?” Many people have thought that Socrates is after verbal definitions that would consistently answer these questions. By examining these passages closely, however, I hope we can see that Plato did not understand his teacher’s aims in this way. The thing Socrates is after is not so much a matter of words and definitions as it is a matter of the objective structure of the world. The world needs to have some kind of objective structure and we need to be able to grasp that structure for our definitions to have any basis in the first place.

I want to quote from both these dialogues at some length because it is important to see the usage of εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea) in context. These terms go on to have an enormously important role in the history of philosophy both inside and outside of the Platonic tradition, so we should take a careful, patient look at the very inception of that lineage. In each passage, I have translated both εἶδος and ἰδέα as “character” because this is the most neutral term I can think of that can be used consistently in each passage. I recommend the exercise, however, of reading each passage over again and mentally replacing “character” with some of our other options to see how such a switch might shift the color or emphasis of the language. Try “look,” “quality,” “appearance,” “essence,” “shape,” “structure,” or, “form.” For many of the quotations, I will include the entire quotation in Greek, taken from the Burnet edition, making bold the phrases that include our key words. Since this series of essays is aimed at the absolute beginner in Platonic philosophy, however, the Greek should not be taken as an intimidating barrier. It is there for the curious reader to see the original phrasing, but those without any Greek can simply skip it.

In the Meno, the whole dialogue opens right away with the focal question, “Can virtue be taught?” but Socrates insists that this question cannot be addressed adequately unless they can answer the more basic question, “What is virtue?” Meno thinks this question is easy, because he is able to rattle off a number of different kinds of virtue: the virtues appropriate to men and the virtues appropriate to women; virtues for slaves, freemen, the elderly, and children. Because there are so many easily recognizable virtues, Meno thinks that Socrates is being ridiculous when he claims not to know what virtue is: “And there are many, many other virtues so that there is no trouble saying about virtue what it is” (72a, all translations mine).

As he does in several dialogues, Socrates points out that listing examples of something is not the same as explaining it. Rattling off examples gives us a many when the original question was asking for a one. It is, he suggests, as though someone were to ask “What is a bee?” and the response came back: “Well, there are honey bees and bumble bees and…” The frustrated questioner would be right to say, “Yeah, I know those are all bees, but I’m not asking about all the different kinds; I’m asking about what is the same across those different kinds.” In just this way, Socrates presses Meno: “Tell me, then, Meno, what is this very thing by which they do not differ from each other but rather are the same” (τοῦτο τοίνυν μοι αὐτὸ εἰπέ, ὦ Μένων· ᾧ οὐδὲν διαφέρουσιν ἀλλὰ ταὐτόν, 72c). By parallel reasoning, when asked about the virtues, it is insufficient to answer with a list of different virtues even if this list is exhaustive. Such an answer tells us only what is many and different, while we are trying to figure out what is one and the same. And this is when Socrates introduces our key term:

Even if they [virtues] are many and various, they do indeed all have some character that is one and the same on account of which they are virtues. One should look to this when asked to answer clearly, “What is virtue?”

κἂν εἰ πολλαὶ καὶ παντοδαπαί εἰσιν, ἕν γέ τι εἶδος ταὐτὸν ἅπασαι ἔχουσιν δι’ ὅ εἰσὶν ἀρεταί, εἰς ὅ καλῶς που ἔχει ἀποβλέψαντα τὸν ἀποκρινόμενον τῷ ἐρωτήσαντι ἐκεῖνο δηλῶσαι, ὅ τυγχάνει οὖσα ἀρετή.
(72c6–d1)

Meno is still unsure what Socrates means, so Socrates gives parallel examples of health, size, strength, shape, color, and sight. Men and women can both be healthy, he says, and this may involve different things, but health itself must have some common nature if we are to identify health in both as the same quality:

Isn’t it the same character everywhere, if it is health, whether in a man or in anything else at all?

ἢ ταὐτὸν πανταχοὺ εἶδος ἐστιν, ἐάνπερ ὑγίεια ᾖ, ἐάντε ἐν ἀνδρὶ ἐάντε ἐν ἄλλῳ ὁτῳοῦν ᾖ;
(72d8–e1)

Again, Socrates uses the example of strength. Although men and women may have various levels of strength, strength itself is the same across these differences:

Even if a women should be strong, won’t it be on account of the same character and the same strength that she is strong? For by “the same” I mean this: strength does not differ with respect to being strong, whether it is in a man or in a woman.

ἐάνπερ ἰσχυρὰ γυνὴ ᾖ, τῷ αὐτῷ εἴδει καὶ τῇ αὐτῇ ἰσχύϊ ἰσχυρὰ ἔσται; τὸ γὰρ τῇ αὐτῇ τοῦτο λέγω· οὐδὲν διαφέρει πρὸς τὸ ἰσχὺς εἶναι ἡ ἰσχύς, ἐάντε ἐν ἀνδρὶ ᾖ ἐάντε ἐν γυναικί.
(72e4–7)

Right away, the first thing to notice from these passages is that Socrates is not speaking about perfect versions of things up in heaven somewhere. What would a perfect “Strength” or a perfect “Health” even be? Instead, he’s talking about something very this-worldly and quite ordinary: the common character that things or situations present to us by which we are able to recognize them and so label them as “virtuous,” “strong,” or “healthy.” He is indeed pushing Meno to verbally say what this character is beyond the mere names “virtue,” “strength,” and “health,” but his point is not really about words, language, or definitions. Instead, he’s pushing Meno to see that the things themselves must have some common pattern.

Next, we should see that the whole method of Socrates presumes that we are all already capable of recognizing the common character in things. So when he says that he “does not know what virtue is,” he isn’t saying that he, or anyone else, is incapable of recognizing virtue. Socratic ignorance is not skepticism about the reality of virtue or the human ability to see it. Instead, his whole point is that we all can recognize virtue when we see it but that we struggle to make clear to ourselves and to others just what it is we are latching onto when we do so. The underlying premise is that full-blown knowledge implies the ability to give the logos, i.e. the ability to articulate a complete account of what we’re talking about beyond simply identifying it. In other words, if I really, fully understood virtue I would be able not just to recognize it when it comes along, but explain it in a way that is complete and self-consistent.

Like the Meno, the Euthyphro quickly settles, after some preliminaries, on the question “What is piety?” Both Socrates and Euthyphro will soon be in the law courts, Socrates because he is being prosecuted for corrupting the youth and Euthyphro because he is prosecuting his own father for murder. As soon as he tells Socrates why he is going to court, Euthyphro is quick to justify his actions. He knows what justice and piety are and he is confident that in prosecuting his father he is doing the right thing. Socrates begs Euthyphro to impart this knowledge to him so that, in his own case, Socrates can claim to be the student of Euthyphro:

So now, by Zeus, tell me what you were just now saying you knew so clearly. What kind of thing do you say the holy and the unholy are, both concerning murder and concerning other matters? Or isn’t the pious itself the same thing in every case? And likewise for the impious, the opposite of everything pious, isn’t it similar to itself and have some one character according to which everything that is going to be impious is not a case of piety?

νῦν οὖν πρὸς Διὸς λέγε μοι ὅ νυνδὴ σαφῶς εἰδέναι διισχυρίζου, ποῖόν τι τὸ εὐσεβὲς φῂς εἶναι καὶ τὸ ἀσεβὲς καὶ περὶ φόνου καὶ περὶ τῶν ἄλλων; ἢ οὐ ταὐτόν ἐστιν ἐν πάσῃ πράξει τὸ ὅσιον αὐτὸ αὑτῷ, καὶ τὸ ἀνόσιον αὖ τοῦ μὲν ὁσίου παντὸς ἐναντίον, αὐτὸ δὲ αὑτῷ ὅμοιον καὶ ἔχον μίαν τινὰ ἰδέαν κατὰ τὴν [μὴ] ὁσιότητα πᾶν ὅτιπερ ἄν μέλλῃ ἀνόσιον εἶναι;
(5c8–d5)

Euthyphro answers the question by saying that piety is the very thing he is doing just then in prosecuting his father, comparing his own action to that of Zeus when he overthrows Kronos. After some questions about whether he really believes such stories about the gods, Socrates protests that he has not actually answered the question. Instead of saying what the pious is, Euthyphro has, at best, only given one example of piety. Euthyphro agrees, however, that there are many other cases of piety, not just this one situation, so Socrates presses him further:

Do you recall, then, that I did not ask you to teach me some one or two of the many pious actions but to teach me that very character by which all the pious actions are pious? For you must articulate how it is that the impious things are impious and the pious things are pious by one character. Or don’t you remember?

Μέμνησαι οὖν ὅτι οὐ τοῦτό σοι διεκελευόμην, ἕν τι ἢ δύο με διδάξαι τῶν πολλῶν ὁσίων, ἀλλ’ ἐκεῖνο αὐτὸ τὸ εἶδος ᾧ πάντα τὰ ὅσια ὅσιά ἐστιν; ἔφησθα γάρ που *μιᾷ ἰδέᾳ τά τε ἀνόσια ἀνόσια εἶναι καὶ τὰ ὅσια ὅσια· ἢ οὐ μνημονεύεις;
(6d9–e1)

We noted in our last essay that Plato tends to use εἶδος and ἰδέα as synonyms, and right here we see him switch back and forth between the two terms with little if any difference in meaning. The later Platonic tradition will sometimes use these terms in two distinct technical senses, but it is interesting to see their original, non-technical usage in these early dialogues.

We can also notice from the above passages that the language of a shared eidos is not only applied to good, positive terms like “virtue,” “health,” and “strength” that we saw in the Meno; Socrates also uses it with reference to the negative and opposite term “impiety.” In the later tradition, there will be some discussion about whether there are really “forms of privations,” but here such a question is not really relevant to Socrates’s point. Whether we are talking about something positive like piety or something negative like impiety, either way, we are capable of recognizing it when we see it and so capable of grasping a common pattern. This should again reinforce the point that Socrates is not discussing ideal versions of things up in heaven. How could there be an ideal of impiety? Instead, he’s simply pointing out that we can see a common eidos running through diverse cases of impiety, so the teacher who claims to know about such things should be able to identify and explain that eidos.

Socrates then continues to press Euthyphro to give the eidos rather than list examples:

So then, teach me this very character, what it is, so that looking at it and using it as a pattern, I can say whether anything of this sort that you or anyone else does is pious, and if it isn’t of that sort, then I can say that it isn’t.

Ταύτην τοίνυν με αὐτὴν δίδαξον τὴν ἰδέαν τίς ποτέ ἐστιν, ἵνα εἰς ἐκείνην ἀποβλέπων καὶ χρώμενος αὐτῇ παραδείγματι, ὃ μὲν ἂν τοιοῦτον ᾖ ὧν ἂν ἢ σὺ ἢ ἄλλος τις πράττῃ φῶ ὅσιον εἶναι, ὃ δ’ ἂν μὴ τοιοῦτον, μὴ φῶ.
(6e3–6)

Out of all the sentences we have quoted, this sentence is especially interesting because here Socrates uses a powerful metaphor that will become incredibly influential in later philosophy. Once he has been taught about piety and impiety, he says, he will be able to use the ἰδέα (idea) as a παράδειγμα (paradeigma). This latter word, from which we derive the English word “paradigm,” refers to the “model” that an artist might use when painting or the “plan” a builder might use in constructing a building. When an artist paints from a model, he must constantly look back and forth between the model and the painting to see just where the painting must be adjusted. The model is a kind of reference point, and he must judge over and over again whether the painting is “true” to that standard. Likewise, a builder must constantly go back to his blueprints, examine the pattern, and figure out where to put the next wall. In a legal context, lawyers use this word in a less physical way. They refer to “precedents,” i.e. former outstanding cases, in order to judge whether the case in hand is or is not a violation of some law.

All this suggests that the eidos or idea is something we can mentally look at and use as a reference. Suppose, for example, that I had a doubtful case of piety (as is Euthyphro’s own suit against his father—despite his protestations). I can recognize piety when I see it in clear-cut cases, and I can also recognize impiety in clear-cut cases, but I become fuzzy when the case is less obvious. Wouldn’t it help to have a reference? Like the blueprint that the builder looks to when he needs to figure out whether a wall is where it is supposed to be, I could look to the eidos of piety and judge the borderline case by that standard. The kind of education that Socrates demands from Euthyphro would yield just such an ability: A person so educated would have clear in his mind not just numerous examples of his subject matter but also the common pattern by which he can judge whether anything at all, even a fuzzy or complicated case, is or is not an example.

This metaphor may be where the perfect-objects-in-heaven misinterpretation comes from since one way that we could have a “paradigm” is by having a perfect version of something. Suppose, for example, that I wanted to improve quality control in a factory. We have widget after widget coming off the factory line, but sometimes the casting isn’t what it should be. My workers need to know what a correct widget looks like so that they can discard the misshapen ones. So I select one of the successful castings and set it aside as a Perfect Widget. I ask the quality control workers to compare each widget coming off the line to the Perfect Widget as their standard. This is not, however, the only way that something can function as a paradigm. In many other types of paradigm, the standard is not itself a perfect version of what is being judged. A blueprint is not a Perfect Building. Indeed, it isn’t a building at all. Similarly, an artist’s model is not a painting. Such paradigms exist in an altogether different mode from the things that they provide the standard for.

In what kind of different mode, then, might the eidos of piety exist? Such a question will drive us straight to the very heart of Platonism, but it will need to wait for the next essay.

The Language of the Forms

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0400

In the last two essays, we have discussed the patterns or structures that our minds latch onto and that we have called “the intelligibles.” Those familiar with Platonism will by now have noticed that I have studiously avoided using the term “Form.” When we speak of “Plato’s Theory of the Forms,” students often have some mixed up ideas about what this means. They often imagine perfect versions of things here on earth floating off in some kind of heaven. Sometimes I find out that this is what they were explicitly taught by a non-specialist professor in a freshmen philosophy class. When they do this, they are imagining Forms as basically things, the same kind of object as ordinary sensible objects, just super-sized and shiny. The very way that scholars tend to talk about “the Forms” only reinforces this tendency to thingify what are emphatically not things.

Despite all the talk of “Plato’s Theory of the Forms,” Plato himself rarely uses any of the Greek words that mean “form,” and there are no passages in any of the dialogues in which he straight-forwardly sets out a theory. Confusingly, there are three different words that are usually translated as “form,” and Plato does not regularly use any of them in a technical sense.

The first word is εἶδος (eidos). This noun is derived from the verb εἴδω (eido), which is a common verb for “seeing,” “looking,” or “investigating.” Many languages use words originally referring to vision to communicate acts of knowing or understanding. Think, for example, of the way we say in English, “Ah, I see now,” or “Don’t you see?” A similar linkage between seeing and knowing can be found in the whole cluster of Greek words related to this root.

In its basic, non-philosophical usage, then, εἶδος refers to the “appearance” or the “look” of something, as when we say in English, “I like the look of this one; I’ll buy it.” When discussing a person, εἶδος can be translated as “looks” or “physique,” usually in a positive sense. When discussing architecture or pottery, εἶδος refers to the “decorations,” “patterns,” or “shapes” that beautify the surface of things. Far from being an abstract, rationalistic, or technical term, therefore, the word εἶδος is rooted in the daily sensuous experience of seeing shapes and patterns all around us.

The second word is ἰδέα (idea), from which we get the English word “idea.” This comes from the same root verb since the infinitive form of εἴδω is ἰδεῖν (idein). Because of this word, you will sometimes encounter an older generation of scholars speaking of “Plato’s Theory of Ideas” instead of “Plato’s Theory of Forms,” but I avoid this language completely because students automatically think of the English word “idea,” and assume that we are discussing notions within our own mind, i.e. “concepts,” rather than objective patterns out there in the world. Plato himself typically uses this word interchangeably with εἶδος, but the later tradition tends to distinguish them in a way we will discuss in a later essay. The important thing to remember is simply that ἰδέα in Greek does not mean “idea” in English. The Greek word refers to an objective character that things really possess rather than a subjective notion we might form when we recognize and think about the objective character.

The third word is μορφή (morphe), of uncertain etymology, which is the word preferred by Aristotle, and it refers to the “shape” of something as opposed to the material that has been sculpted into that shape. Later Platonists adopt Aristotle’s form-matter distinction as congenial to the whole Platonic line of thinking, but it is important for the English-speaking student to realize that this is a different Greek word being used even though it has a very similar sense.

Returning, then, to εἶδος and ἰδέα, we must now make clear that they do not refer to some super-object in another world. Instead, they refer to the “look” of things all around us, what we grasp with our minds when we see and understand what things are. We might translate both these words as the “character” of something, the qualitative whatness that we take in with a single glance. More poetically, we could also translate both words as a thing’s peculiar “style,” its distinct way of being that makes it different from other kinds of thing.

In Latin, we have a similar etymological connection between the “look” of things and the categorization of things into different kinds. Just like in Greek, the Latin word species comes from the verbal root spec-, as in specio and specto, which means to “look at,” “watch,” or “behold.” So something’s “species” or “kind” was originally connected to identifying things by their different ways of appearing.

In both Greek and Latin, then, we find a natural bridge between the physical act of looking at something and the mental act of recognizing what it is. This bridge is natural because, in the very structure of the world, the patternedness of things is everywhere, continually presenting itself to all our senses. We could similarly talk about the “sound” of birdsong or the “feel” of a summer’s breeze. All such language refers to the directly experienced “character” of something in the world by which we are able to recognize it and form a concept for that kind of thing. The “look,” the “sound,” or the “feel” of something is not itself the concept or idea that we form subjectively in our own head. Instead, it is the objective pattern in the thing we encounter without which we could not form a concept in the first place.

Moving forward, then, I will sometimes lapse into the typical scholarly vocabulary and speak of “the Forms,” but I will also simply leave the word eidos untranslated as a reminder to think carefully about what it means. The plural of this word, I should mention, is εἴδη (eide), and philosophers, especially in phenomenology, sometimes use the adjective “eidetic.” In the next essay, we will see this word and its synonym ἰδέα put to use in the context of two relatively early and well-known Platonic dialogues. I hope all this background work, however, will make our first encounter with Plato’s actual writing much more profitable.

Sensibles and Intelligibles

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0400

In last week’s essay, we thought about the way that one and the same song can be performed in different ways on many different occasions. I advanced the paradoxical claim that the song itself, the thing that is one in all its many performances, is not something we hear with our ears but rather something we grasp with our minds. This week, we will add some nuance to this claim and introduce some technical vocabulary from the Platonic tradition.

Let us return to the idea that a song can be written down in the form of sheet music, read by a skilled musician, and recognized without any sounds being made at all. The song itself, then, is a kind of structure or pattern that we can understand or think about even without hearing it played. Conversely, listening to a particular playing of the song necessarily involves the vibration of the air over a particular span of time in a particular place. Even if I play exactly the same performance of the song over again by hitting the repeat button on my stereo, the second play-through will be distinct from the first and involve different volumes of air being moved through my ear canal at a different time.

This points to a basic distinction that is critical for the whole Platonic tradition, the distinction between what is “intelligible,” i.e. what can be grasped by the mind, and what is “sensible,” i.e. what can be grasped by the senses. In Greek, we can use adjectives as nouns (grammarians call this the “substantive” usage), so “an intelligible” is simply one of these structures or patterns that we have been talking about, while “a sensible” is simply something you can see, hear, taste, touch, or feel.

If you are curious to learn some Greek vocabulary, the terms here are very important for the Platonic tradition. The word for “sense” or “sensation” is αἴσθησις (aisthesis), from which we get the word “aesthetic.” The adjective we derive from the same root is αἰσθητός (aisthetos) meaning “sensible.” If we want to refer to “a sensible thing” we put that adjective in the neuter singular: αἰσθητόν (aistheton). If we want to refer to the whole category of sensible things, we say “the sensibles,” putting the adjective in the neuter plural and adding the definite article: τὰ αἰσθητά (ta aistheta).

We have very similar terms for the “intelligible” side of this distinction. The relevant root word for “mind” or “intelligence,” about which we will have much more to say, is νοῦς (nous). From this we derive the adjective νοητός (noetos), meaning “intelligible.” The same grammatical logic applies to this adjective so “an intelligible” would be a νοητόν (noeton) and “the intelligibles” would be τὰ νοητά (ta noeta). For easy reference, here are the terms in chart form:

αἴσθησις	sense, sensation, sensory experience
αἰσθητόν	a sensible, i.e. a sensible object
τὰ αἰσθητά	the sensibles, all sensible objects as a category
νοῦς	mind, intelligence
νοητόν	an intelligible, i.e. an intelligible object
τὰ νοητά	the intelligibles, all intelligible objects as a category

Attentive readers will realize that this distinction between sensible things and intelligible things is related to the distinction between material things and immaterial things that comes to feature prominently in later philosophy. It is important to realize, however, that these two distinctions are not exactly the same and they emphasize different features of things. There are many material realities that are not sensible (such as neutrinos), and there may well be immaterial realities that are not intelligible (such as ghosts). When we distinguish between sensible and intelligible, we are not asking whether or not things are made of physical stuff but rather asking what mode of consciousness they require.

So far the distinction seems simple enough. Sensible things are things I see; intelligible things are things I understand. Unfortunately, human consciousness is not so simple. In reality, we never simply see or hear anything at all. Instead, because we are intelligent beings, our seeing and hearing is always shot through with understanding. Return again to the example of hearing a song. We can distinguish between the pure sensations coming through my ears and the intelligible pattern I recognize with my mind. In concrete experience, however, it is impossible to just hear the pure sensations. We always hear the sounds as patterns that our minds recognize. When I hear Bill Evans play those opening chords, I do not hear vibrations in the air. I hear chords, and more specifically, I hear the opening chords of a specific song that I recognize. Even when the sounds are entirely new to us or very strange, our minds are already at work categorizing and understanding.

Vision and the other senses work similarly. It is a common idea in philosophy that the basic data of vision are colors. But this is a mistake. I do not first see patches of green and gray, think about it for a second, and then figure out that I am looking at a tree. Instead, I simply see a tree. In fact, the order is reversed: In the first moment of vision I see a tree, and then with a little effort and shift of attention, such as that which a painter might make, I can see patches of green and gray. Some art instructors even recommend squinting or blurring your vision a little so that you can trick your mind into not seeing the tree and instead see the colors. Even with such tricks, however, it is impossible to avoid seeing that the colors are the same colors as those you have seen before and that they are arranged in a particular pattern. Again, I want to emphasize that this pattern recognition is not a second moment deduced from a first moment of pure sensation. The human mind functions in such a way that all this visual processing and pattern recognition occurs before sensations ever arrive at the level of consciousness.

It is common to think that sensations are the basic stuff of our lives and intelligibles are strange philosophical abstractions. The exact opposite, however, is true. Since we never actually experience pure sensations, the basic fabric of our day-to-day experience, all our memories, and all our ordinary thinking are made up of intelligibles. If anything, pure sensations are abstractions. They are the unintelligible residue that we are left with when we philosophically cut away the intelligible patterns within sensory experience. We are left with the idea of pure sensations that we recognize must be an important ingredient in sensory experience. The idea of pure sensations, then, is an abstraction we make when we reflect on the structure of experience but not something we ever experience directly.

Unlike pure sensations, sensibles are not abstractions. They are the objects that we experience through sensory experience—trees, rocks, faces, bird songs, and breath—which we have already observed is inevitably saturated with intelligibility. In one sense, these sensibles are the basic objects of our ordinary experience, then, but in the following essays we will see that it is precisely the intelligible aspect of sensibles that we experience, think about, remember, and discuss. Between the two, then, sensibles in their sensuousness are the strange ones; intelligibles, by contrast, are all you’ve ever known.