Dr Greg Bahnsen - Normative Ethics: Abstract and Formalist Deontologist (Part 3)

Secular philosophy, of course. Thales. Thales was the first of the Milesian school of philosophers. The Milesians, all being philosophers, centered on the island of Miletus, and the Milesians would include Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. All of the Milesians were convinced that reality was a unity of some sort, and they found the unity of reality in the stuff, if you will, out of which all particular things come. Thales, being a Milesian, with this metaphysical, monistic assumption and the assumption that the unity of reality is found in a kind of stuff, had to ask himself, what kind of stuff is this? Thales was of that disposition, a philosopher who would say, look and see, rather than stop and think about these questions. So as Thales would look and see. What seemed pervasive to him about reality, roundabout, was that everything contained water in one form or another, and that water could take various forms. It could be a gas, steam, it could be a solid ice, or it could be a liquid water itself. And so Thales was led to the conviction that all is water, all is water. Anaximander, on the other hand, was convinced that it was really pushing things a bit to hold that everything, water, sand, does not seem very watery after all. But Anaximander took philosophical reasoning another step, understanding that if he posed some other particular thing to be what all of reality is supposed to be composed of, the same kind of refutation was awaiting him. Somebody could say, well, after all, Anaximander, it doesn't seem like everything's fired, doesn't seem like everything is cold, doesn't seem like everything is this or that particular thing. And so Anaximander reasoned that whatever the unity of reality amounted to, it could not be anything particular. It had to be something that was without particular or distinguishing marks, consequently an action. Mandra said, reality is the boundless. All is the boundless aperon, without internal and external boundaries, without distinguishing marks, without any kind of limits whatsoever. Anaximandra, by the way, was also an early, if not the earliest, evolutionary speculator. Out of the boundless, everything comes, and to the boundless everything returns by necessity. Anaximander said he was also a determinist. He believed that everything that happened happened by way of necessity. Now, Anaximenes was convinced that the explanation of the boundless was not really all that helpful. Anaximenes tried to account for all qualitative changes in the world or qualitative differences in the world on the basis of quantitative variations. So he had to find a stuff out of which everything could be made that allowed for this quantitative change. And that's why he said all is air, because air could be compacted or it could be expanded. And he thought that would account for every qualitative change seen around us. Now, what can we say about the Milesian school? Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes? Well, every one of them were metaphysical monists. They all believe that all is water, boundless or air. And consequently all of them denied what is essential to Christianity, the creator, creature distinction. If there are gods, they must be water gods or air gods or gods that arise from the boundless like men do. And so the creature and the creator are put on a par. Moreover, we see the dialectical tension in all pagan thought. On the one hand, man determines the ultimate nature of everything. Man's mind will tell us what is basic to all other forms of reality. And yet there's an irrationalism in that man's mind is not allowed to be a separate kind of entity. Man's mind, according to Thales, is what? It's water. So Thales, man's opinion that all is water is nothing more but water, gurgling out the watery conclusion that everything is water. But you see, if everything is reduced to water, then why should we listen to the gurglings of man's mind if everything is air? Why should what appears to be a rational, testable theory about reality be given any credence at all? It's just another form of air, this mental conclusion. Consequently, you have in the Milesians a form of rationalism. We can tell you what everything is. And also a form of irrationalism. We're going to obliterate the separate dignity of the human mind by reducing it to everything else. Consequently, moral distinctions for the Milesians would reduce to developments that are essentially random, unaccountable developments, chance developments, all distinctions, even distinctions between good and evil, would have to be nothing more but variations of water, variations of air, variations of the boundless. And consequently, the destruction of Milesian metaphysics and epistemology is simultaneously the destruction of Milesian ethics. It was impossible for any of the Milesians to develop a coherent ethic given the internal problems of their systems. Well, we turn from the Milesians, then, to the next major step in pre Socratic philosophy. And that's the debate between Heraclitus and the Eleatics, the Eleatics being represented especially by Parmenides. And so the debate between Heraclitus and the Eleatic Parmenides, Heraclitus. Well, the basic difference between Heraclitus and the Milegions, of course, is that whereas the Milesians found the unity of reality in a stuff out of which everything's made, Heraclitus found the unity of reality in a pattern that can be discerned in the process of change. Unity is not a stuff kind of thing. It is a pattern kind of thing. He was. He introduced a whole new category of reasoning or speculation into the discussion. According to Heraclitus, things are unified. They appear to be permanent. When there is orderly change. For instance, if I'm a Heraclitian, I believe that right now I am changing. However, because I am changing at essentially the same rate that you, you are changing. Since my geographical position or location is changing at essentially the same rate that yours is, it appears to us that these are permanent, that we are permanent, that I'm up here lecturing and you're sitting there taking notes, and that that is essentially our relationship, and it's a fairly permanent arrangement, at least until we have another break. However, that isn't at all the way things really are. Reality and appearance must be distinguished. It appears that things are permanent. As a matter of fact, everything is changing. As Heraclide has said, you cannot step into the same river twice. Anytime you step into the river, it's going to change. The leaf is going to float downstream a little bit more is going to be worn off. The rocks underneath the water that you're actually stepping in is now going to be moving on. And consequently, by the time you lift your foot, pedal back down, it's a different river. Nevertheless, Heraclitus believed that the symbol for all of this change, the symbol for all of reality, was fire. Was fire. They called this fire, a kind of logos that governs the constant pattern of changes in the world. Heraclitus believed in the distinction between reality and appearance. He believed that everything was in the process of change, that patterns of change were governed by the logos, are the fire of reality. And he was the first philosopher to have taken up moral issues to specifically address the questions of man's life and behavior. According to Heraclitus, we should live according to the logos. We should submit to the eternal fire that permeates reality. And when we did, when we do this, when we live rationally, if we live in a logicistical way, if you will, by submitting to the logos, we're going to engage in a disciplined lifestyle or a form of permanence of character. Stability is shown. And as Mr. Frame himself points out in the syllabus, that's rather strange for a Man who believes that everything is changing. Strange thing to say that the ethical man is the one who shows no changes. He's a stable individual. Well, that aside, the question is how do we get in contact with the logos? How do we know what the logos requires of us? How do we submit to this everlasting fire? How do we find out our duty? Well, since the logos is reason, science, another translation of it, obviously we find out our duty through the use of our reason. In fact, all Greek systems of ethics in one way or another are going to boil down to that. You must live according to reason. A number of years of philosophy have helped us to understand, however, that reason means a lot of different things. Reason can mean intuition, it can mean intelligence, it can mean experience, it can mean logic, it can mean psychology, the use of the mind, the functioning of the brain, reasoning can mean any number of things. And as a matter of fact, when men do use their reason, when we understand reason in the same way, even they come to different conclusions. Living according to reason, it seems to me, is just a put offish sort of question philosophically. Because once you say you must live according to reason, the natural question then becomes what does reason say? Or what is reason? And so it turns out that Heraclitus gives us an ethic of duty, but it's impossible to know what our duties are. Parmenides stood over against Heraclitus, whereas Heraclitus. Well, there was one thing on which Parmenides and Heraclitus fully agreed, and that was the distinction between reality and appearance. Heraclitus said, it appears to you that things are permanent. You're wrong. As a matter of fact, that's only an appearance. In reality, everything's changing. Parmenides says it appears to you things are changing. It appears to you that you can actually eat a bowl of chocolate ice cream. You're wrong. Everything is the same and nothing changes. Parmenides was led to this conclusion from a very interesting, in fact, I think ambiguously interpreted premise. And that is there is no nothing. There is no nothing, since all words have referential objectivity, that is the say, all words refer to some objective existence. If the word nothing had meaning, it would have to refer to something that exists. But what is nothing? It is the unexisting or the non existent. Consequently, Parmenides reasoned if nothing was a meaningful concept, there would be the not existing existence. And that's a contradiction in terms. And according to Parmenides, the real is the rational. So the idea that the non existing can exist being A contradiction in violating reason or rationality cannot be real. I can see you're all convinced by that, overwhelmed with the argumentation. Let's take it a step further. If there is no nothing, then obviously any something that now exists must always have existed, because if it didn't exist, it would first have to have been what? Nothing. And from nothing it became something. But since there is no nothing, it always was something, which is to say, it always was. Moreover, it's indestructible, because if you could destroy the something that now is, it would become nothing. But there is no nothing. And since something can't go into nothing, something must always be. Moreover, if there is no origin and no destruction, then there's no change whatsoever. And especially is there no change, since there can't be empty space that Parmenides. If there was empty space, that would be an existing, not existing, a nothing which existed. Since that's impossible rationally, then everything that exists is eternal, permanent and unchanging. It's uncreated and indestructible. Moreover, there can be no distinctions between things because that would indicate a change, diversity. It would destroy the rational order and unity of reality. And so, for Parmenides, the unity of reality is not found in the stuff, as the Milesian said. It's not found in the pattern, as Heraclitus said. But Parmenides said the unity of reality is found in that there's nothing to be unified, because everything is one, and one is by its very character what we mean by unity. Reality becomes static and undifferentiated. Therefore, by saying that the real is the rational. Parmenides, of course, is the paradigm of the rationalist. Yet, on the other hand, he has to say that the world we live in that is discerned by our senses, the world that shows us diversity and change, motion and all the rest, is nothing more than an illusion, only an appearance. That means that we are misled and irrational in the use of our reason or our minds, or at least our senses. Everything is one, although it doesn't look that way. So here you have rationalism and irrationalism trying to sleep together existence. And it doesn't come up with a very good offspring. Because if Parmenides is right and there are no distinctions and there is no change, if the change that we see around us is illusion, there's no need for ethics, is there? Let's assume that Parmenides is right. As I get done with this lecture and I go back to my room, let's say I run over somebody, I Didn't run over anybody, because I really didn't move, actually. In fact, there really isn't any me set over against the person to be run over. In fact, I couldn't have moved from my position. In fact, I couldn't have had an identifiable position in the lecture hall either. Because all reality is undifferentiated. There's just one great one. And at that point, now what you do is you go back in your notes, take all the criticism of Eastern religion, just plug it right in here. Because here you have another one of these forms, if you're rational in the name of rational but irrational unity, moral distinctions reduced to chance and illusory developments in the physical world. Well, what we see then is that in these early pre Socratics, the Milesians, the Eleatics and Heraclitus, that ethics becomes impossible. There's no way to develop a moral duty for man. We turn from these schools of thought that have reached a dead end to a different approach to ethics. All of the previous ones have been somewhat monistic. We turn now to a pluralist approach to early metaphysics. We've seen the pluralist Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus, the early forms of what will turn out to be modern physical theory. Empedocles agreed with Parmenides that reality is a plenum, that is its full. There's no empty spaces, there is no nothing. However, he disagreed with Parmenides. The change was impossible. Empedocles said, if you have a plurality of things, they can at least change position. Therefore, you don't have to have empty space as long as you have a plurality of things. Consequently, Empedocles held, for the sake of salvaging change, Empedocles held that there are four basic kinds of earth, air, water and fire, what he called the four roots. These four roots of everything are joined in various ways and divided in various ways by two kinds of motion, love and strife. Love is a uniting kind of motion. Strife is a differentiating kind of motion. When love and strife work together on the four roots, that's how we account for, that's the origin of all the particular things we see in the world around us. Anaxagoras improved upon Empedocles, if it's an improvement at all, by saying, you're right, we can't be monist, we must be pluralists. However, your version of pluralism is much too limited. You only have four basic kinds of reality. Anaxagoras said, we need an infinite number of realities. And he called them seeds. He held that there is an infinite number of infinitely small seeds that make up the world. Now, these seeds are all qualitatively different. Some are cabbage seeds, some are sealing wax seeds, some are ship seeds, some are king seeds, some are book seeds, some are rubber seeds, seeds, on and on and on and on. There's an infinite number of these various kinds of seeds all around us. Now, in the Urga Shikta, before there was anything as we now know it, in early history and primal history, these seeds of all the different sorts of things were all harmoniously mixed together in a. In a beautiful suspension and blend so much like so that you couldn't tell the difference between any particular thing. There was just reality was homogenized out of any particular kind of existence. You couldn't discern anything. It was similar to the boundless, I suppose, Anaximandra's boundless. Well, Anaxagoras held well. Another illustration might be like chocolate milk. You put the chocolate in the milk, and if you stir it well enough, then it's all integrated and you can't tell the difference between the chocolate and the milk. But if you let it sit, then of course the chocolate goes to the bottom and it all begins to separate out. You have milk over here, chocolate over here. Well, there was a time when all these seeds were so nicely mixed together, according to Anaxagoras, you couldn't tell the difference between anything. But into this beautiful blend enters the one singular kind of motion. Mind or noose nous sets up a circular vortex in this homogenous blend of the seeds. And now all the seeds of various sorts begin coming together and grouping themselves so that you have cabbage seeds that get together over here, and you get book seeds over here and sealing wax seeds over here. And they all kind of spin out of this vortex and form the particular things of reality as we now know it. Now, in every particular kind of thing, there are seeds of every other kind of thing. But the mixture, the predominance in the particular things that we see is what gives those particular things their particularization. So that in a book you'll also have seeds of baseball players, oranges, and all the rest. However, the predominant seeds are the book seeds. And that's why you get books or trees or rocks or streams, even though there's a little bit of everything in all of them. Now, Democritus comes along. He develops the pluralist theory into the school of atomism. Empedocles had said there's four kinds of realities. Anaxagoras says there must be an infinite number of seeds, but these are all qualitatively different. Democritus simply adds to Anaxagoras theory that they're all qualitatively the same. And now you get the earliest form of physical theory, the earliest expression of modern physical theory, atomism. Democritus says there is an infinite number of uncuttable elements, the atoms of existence, of reality. However, they don't differ from one another as cabbage atoms, fire atoms, orange atoms, baseball player atoms, river atoms, and all the rest. What you have instead is all the atoms are the same in terms of their primary qualities. They differ from one another only in size, shape and velocity, but they don't differ from one another in color, smell, taste, appearance, that sort of thing. Now, for Democritus, our senses mislead us because if we look at the world, our senses tell us there are secondary qualities in the world. Colors, differentiation between types of things, cabbages and sealing wax, for instance. Democritus says that's not really the way things are. All qualitative changes are nothing more but quantitative changes. Who do you hear there? Anaxeminas is being reflected. All these things are nothing more but quantitative changes, configurations in the atoms themselves. Epicurus now develops Democritus atomism by saying that these atoms are falling constantly through space, and they don't fall in straight lines. There is an irrational swerve in one of the original atoms, and that sets up a billiard ball reaction among all the atoms falling through space that gets things moving and forms the various kinds of realities or particulars that we see around us. So anyway, for the pluralist or the atomist, as they come to be called through the developmental pattern that I've rehearsed for you, reality is reducible to tiny pieces of matter in motion. Reason is the way that we know about the atoms. This is not a scientific theory. It's not based upon sensation. Your syllabus tells you that knowledge begins in sense perception. For these people, that's not strictly accurate. According to Democritus, sense perception was usable, but it was misleading. Sense perception isn't the beginning of truth. Reason is the beginning of truth. Democritus was like Anaximander. Anaximander said, don't look at the world around you to find out what's real. Stop and think. Don't look and see. Stop and think. Democritus was like that, although he wanted to add the looking and seeing for the sake of practical living. Democritus said we have to stop and think, what must reality be like? So he was really more of a rationalist than he was an empiricist. And Democritus accordingly believed that ethics was living in terms of reason, living rationally. Epicurus makes it clear, as you would know from the use of the term, Epicurean made it clear that to live rationally meant to live for pleasure. We must live to please ourselves. Only sensory pleasure is the criterion of good and evil. However, Epicurus and Democritus wanted to distinguish between two types of pleasure. This ad hoc and arbitrary way of drawing distinctions in order to salvage the nobility of your ethic is characteristic of ancient philosophy. Well, it's characteristic of modern philosophy too, for that matter. What Epicurus says is, Democratus says we must seek pleasure, happiness and then say, however, if we say that to the masses, what are they going to do? They're all going to get drunk and party and get syphilis and all the rest. So we have to stop all these things from happening. So they distinguish between refined pleasure and coarse pleasure, or the refined activity of the atoms in our body and the coarse activity of the atoms. According to both Democritus and Epicurus, even the gods that exist are made up of material atoms. The gods are not supernatural spiritual beings. They are nothing but refined combinations of atoms, even as our mind is nothing more than refined combination of atoms. Therefore the gods are nothing to fear and death is nothing to fear, because at death the atoms simply disperse and take on a new form. Now, death is nothing to fear and pleasure is the only proper goal for man. Now, if you were told that you took it to heart, how would you live? Well, I think you would probably live in riot and excess. However, Epicurus prevented that by reasoning that if we are going to be reasoned, by reasoning that we must be reasonable, as you must take into account the long term effects of your pleasures. There are some pains which will lead to ultimate pleasure or to greater pleasure. In illustration, although it's not one that he would endorse, is the pain of putting a needle in your arm to inject some kind of drug. Obviously it's painful for a moment, but on the other hand it leads to this great, supposedly great high that you have when you're on drugs. And so there's a pain that leads to more pleasure. So that would be theoretically or formally endorsed. On the other hand, there are some pleasures which lead to greater pains, right? So I get drunk and I really enjoy that. I'm really laid back, all the rest. But then tomorrow I'm sick to my stomach and have a headache and I'm hung over. And so Epicurus said, the simplest and the safest way to pleasure was to follow the simple pleasure. Not the coarse atoms that appeal to the senses, as Democritus said, but the refined atoms. The simple pleasures are the intellectual pleasures. Epicurus has really received a bad press through history and the use of the word Epicurean because he was no efectorean in terms of excessive living. He said, a little bit of wine, some cheese, a good book and discussion with my friends is all I live for. And he meant a little bit of wine and cheese, just enough to sustain himself. But the intellectual pleasures of discussing good books with his friends was what he endorsed. Simple pleasures. That's how to live rationally. Moderate your desires. Well, there's an obvious problem here, isn't there? Here you have two atomists, Democritus and Epicurus, two atomists who are utter materialists trying to give us an ethical code. They're materialists who don't believe that we're going to suffer anything after we die and don't believe we have anything to fear from the gods. Even now the gods are nothing more but shadowy type types of beings that can't interfere in our lives, and everything's materialistic. So why should we live in the ways that they say we should? And moreover, what does it mean to say there's such a thing as a duty? I know what it is to pick up a book in this world, and I know what it is to stub my toe on a door or on a chair. I know what it is to sit in a chair, to eat a drumstick. I know all these physical things from the world, but I have never yet stubbed my toe, picked up or eaten a duty. And if everything is atoms in perpetual motion, then how can they justify the assumption that there's such a thing as ethical duty? What I'm getting at here is what you already know, and that's that materialism cannot give you an ethic, materialism cannot give you an ethic. And even the ethic that Epicurus wanted to suggest, we should live according to our reason, we can ask ourselves, what is reason if you're a materialist, and even if you can justify the existence of an immaterial thing called reason, or if you can follow in some way Democritus strained explanation of reason as fire atoms, what does reason dictate to us? Here we're back to Heraclitus, and the difficulty is that reason can mean any number of things, and certainly leads different people to different conclusions. Well, another, I hope you can see that the pluralist, the school of pluralism or atomism, was an attempt to combine various aspects of previous philosophers from the Milesians, Eleatics, Fleisians and all the rest. Concepts having to do with being, becoming motion, one, many unity, parts, plurality, sense, reason. All of these things are combined in different ways by the pluralist. Another combinational school, if you will, or another school of synthesis would be the Pythagoreans in the ancient world, As Democritus said. But the refined atoms, the simple pleasures, are the intellectual pleasures. Epicurus has really received a bad press through history in the use of the word Epicurean, because he was no Epicurean in terms of excessive living. He said, a little bit of wine, some cheese, a good book and discussion with my friends is all I live for. And he meant a little bit of wine and cheese, just enough to sustain himself. But the intellectual pleasures of discussing good books with his friends is what he endures. Simple pleasures. That's how to live rationally. Moderate your desires. Well, there's an obvious problem here, isn't there? Here you have two atomists, Democritus and Epicurus, two atomists who are utter materialists trying to give us an ethical code. They're materialists who don't believe that we're going to suffer anything after we die and don't believe we have anything to fear from the gods. Even now the gods are nothing more but shadowy types of beings that can't interfere in our lives. And everything's materialistic. So why should we live in the way that they say we should? And moreover, what does it mean to say there's such a thing as a duty? I know what it is to pick up a book in this world, and I know what it is to stub my toe on a door or on a chair. I know what it is to sit in a chair, to eat a drumstick. I know all these physical things from the world, but I have never yet stubbed my toe, picked up or eaten a duty. And if everything is atoms in perpetual motion, then how can they justify the assumption that there's such a thing as ethical duty? What I'm getting at here is what you already know, and that's that materialism cannot give you an ethic, materialism cannot give you an ethic. And even the ethic that Epicurus wanted to suggest that we should live according to our reason, we can ask ourselves, what is reason? If you're a materialist and even if you can justify the existence of an immaterial thing called reason, or if you can follow in some way Democritus strained explanation of reason as fire atoms, what does reason dictate to us? They were back to Heraclitus. And the difficulty is that reason can mean any number of things and certainly leads different people to different conclusions. Well, another, I hope you can see that the pluralist, the school of pluralism or atomism was an attempt to combine various aspects of previous philosophers from the Milesians, Eleatics, Kleisians and all the rest of the concepts having to do with being, becoming motion, one, many, unity, plurality, sense, reason. All these things are combined in different ways by the pluralist. Another combinational school, if you will, or another school of synthesis would be the Pythagoreans. In the ancient world, the Pythagoreans also held to an ethic of duty, according to the Pythagoreans, on all of reality, well, ultimate reality. They were dualistic in their approach. Ultimate reality was made up of geometric forms and numbers and numbers and geometric forms. Proportions in combination and geometric forms accounted for the configuration or molded qualities of physical reality. Everything around us is made up of chaotic matters, but in mathematical proportion or shaped according to geometric form. Now, Pythagoreans believed in the transmigration of souls and therefore practiced. In fact, they were as much a cult as they were a mathematical society or philosophical society. They practiced a very rigid regime of purity. A person should engage himself in mathematical speculation as a way of escaping the eternal recur. Not the eternal, but the constant recurrence of separate life for him. And he should practice purity where he avoided, for instance, eating meat, avoided sexual pleasure, and was ascetic in his approach to life. Now, why should we do these things? Because we can escape the cycle of rebirth and be merged into the one, into the immaterial formal reality that accounts for everything else that we see around us. And here's another situation, another case where you can just plug in your notes on Eastern religion. All the criticisms of an ultimate breakdown of the distinction between good and evil or differentiation would apply here even as they apply to Parmenides. Well, the earliest days of philosophy don't inspire a lot of confidence. Obviously you have the Milesians and they can't agree and can't account for the unity of reality. You have the Heraclesians, and they debate with the Eleatics, Parmenides and Zeno and others the difficulties there. You have the pluralist and you have problems with their philosophy. And you have the Pythagoreans problems with their philosophy. It's little wonder that by the time the Sophists appear in Greece as professional teachers of philosophy, that they were advocating the relativity of all truth. After all, you propound one opinion and as soon as you know it, somebody else comes along with a different opinion, equally convincing. And so Protagoras, as a leading sophist philosopher, said, man is the measure of all things. Everything is relative to the individual man. And if everything is relative, that means ethical standards are relative as well. There can't be any absolute moral position that we can assume. There isn't any objective truth about morality. There's just what's right or what's wrong. For you individually, there are no moral restraints because man is the measurer of all things. Except that Protagoras recognized one law of nature, by which he meant a descriptive law of nature. I believe that all animals and men seek their own preservation. So the law of self preservation, according to Protagoras, justified living in society and submitting to the rules of society as positivistic laws. You submit to the rules of society not because they are absolutely right. You don't resist them on any such ideas that they're absolutely wrong. You submit to the rules of society because that's the safest way to live. Self preservation is advanced by men joining together and protecting one another's interests. Well, there are difficulties with the Sophistic approach, quite clearly. If man is the measurer of all things, then it would seem that man can be the measure of whether he seeks his own preservation as well. Why shouldn't he commit suicide as the Stoics advocated so often? Why should he seek to preserve himself? And if truth is relative, if man is the measure of all things, then we have a kind of irrationalism here that doesn't allow for any moral discernment. How could the Sophist have taught success in society, how to win arguments through sophistry, that is justifiable deceptions and reasoning? How could they have taught that we should even try to get ahead and be successful? How could they justify their own occupations? It seems that sophism, just like other systems, then denies moral distinctions as being ultimate and cannot give us any firm moral guidance whatsoever. In fact, it was Socrates concern that the Sophists were destroying Greek culture by undermining the idea of a universal and objective moral norm. In fact, the Sophists went so far, I think the they got what they deserved, of course, but the ultimate End was the position of Gorgias. Gorgias said that there were three things that characterized his philosophy. First, nothing exists. Second, even if something exists, we couldn't know it. Third, even if we could know it, we never could communicate it. That utter and nihilism, it seems to me. I mean, there's no worth in anything. Nothing even exists. According to Gorgias. That's where relativism took them. So it's, I think, fairly understandable that Socrates and Plato come along and they see there has to be a real great change in the course of philosophy if we're going to salvage ethics. Let us not forget the ethical motivation behind Socratic Platonic philosophy. To save society, to save axiological realism, that is that values do objectively exist, to save the universality of duty law, to save normative ethics in general, Socrates and Plato had to come up with a philosophical scheme that would better the people who had gone before them, and that would answer the skeptics in their society, the sophist around them. So what did Plato do? Well, in terms of metaphysics and epistemology, Plato of course was a brilliant philosopher. Nothing can be taken away from him in that regard. He has influenced all of Western thought. As Whitehead said, all of Western thought is a series of footnotes on Plato. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it gets at basic truth. Plato really reformed course of philosophy and was a great stimulus for the development of contrary or related schools of speculation. But having said all that and tipping our hat to Plato, it must also be recognized that Plato was doing nothing more but combining different ideas that his predecessors had been working with. I'll give you an illustration. One of the key aspects of Platonic metaphysics and epistemology is dualism. Plato holds that there are two realms, a transcendent and an eminent realm. Well, that wasn't a new idea. After all, Pythagoras believed in two realms also. The realm of number and the realm of physical matter. Democritus held the two realms. The realm of primary qualities, where we find atoms that differ only in shape, size and velocity, and the realm of secondary qualities, where we run into cabbages and red herrings and all the rest. Rest. So this dualistic aspect in Plato is certainly not new. Moreover, Plato tended to put in the upper story, to use Schaeffer's terminology, in the transcendent realm, he tended to put matters of reason, unity and permanence. Well, now, if you look back in the history of philosophy, you'll see that is the same The Milesians believed that unity was the most basic thing about reality. Parmenides believed that. Parmenides and Heraclitus both believed there was a difference between reality and appearance. Plato said the upper story is the realm of reality, the lower story, the realm of appearance. Moreover, reason dominates the upper story. The real is the rational. There's Parmenides again, whereas the lower story is the realm of paradise, process, Heraclitus, constant change and chaos. And it's the material realm, the realm of sensory experience, the realm of change. The Platonic approach to reality, where you have the realm of the forms. Remember, Pythagoras held that the upper story was made up of numerical and geometric proportions and forms. And so very similar. Plato has improved on that by diversifying. But that's the realm of unity, reality and permanence. And it's known by the mind, reason. The lower story is formed reality, but it's in constant change. It's the realm of historical experience and it's illusory, it's known by the senses. Now, having solve, as he thought, the metaphysic and epistemological problem in that way, through his dualism, Plato then had a way to answer the sophist. He could say to the sophist, after all, there is objective truth, there is a realm of the unchanging one, there is the unity of the forms, there is objective truth. And we know this objective truth not on the basis of sensation, because sensation only gives you illusion, not on the basis of what our senses tell us, but rather on the basis of what we would call intuition, what he called recollection. The eternal and unchanging forms, especially the form of the good, is known by way of recollection, we remember it from our pre existent life. If as a matter of fact, pre existence isn't a myth for Plato, since he had a hard time experimenting, expressing the idea of intuition. The highest of the forms, according to Plato, is the form of the good. And so to some extent all reality partakes in that highest form. It's a very difficult part of Plato's writings. The commentators that I have studied the most tend to interpret him as saying that the good, it's like a pyramid, and the good is at the top of the pyramid. It's the one form, and the pyramid embraces, or the tip of the pyramid embraces all the forms underneath, although they are somewhat different from the tip as well, but they all lead to the tip also. Plato seems to say that every form is some subdivision of the form of the good. There is really only one ultimate form, only one ultimate reality called the good, and yet it's diversified in the form of catness and dogness and duckness and all the rest. So good is the highest of the forms, and all reality partakes to some extent in that goodness. Evil, consequently, is non being. Evil is non being, matter is evil, and matter is non being. Thirdly, we have to note that for Plato, good is even above the gods, whatever gods there may be, they too must look up to the ultimate form of the good, to the apex of the pyramid. We run across this outlook in a classic passage in philosophical literature, the Euthyphro in the Dialogue. The Euthyphro. Euthyphro has come to Athens in order to prosecute his own father, which he thinks, whom he thinks to be guilty of impiety. Socrates meets Euthyphro going into court, asking what he's doing in Athens, and gets the background to what's happening. And Socrates then teases Euthyphro, although Euthyphro doesn't know it, with the question, well, then, Euthyphro, if you feel confident enough to prosecute your own father for impiety, then obviously you know piety and impiety very well. You must know very exactly Acrobos, the Greek adverb, you must know very precisely, accurately, what piety is. Euthypro says, oh, well, of course I do, Socrates. And then Socrates asks him, you know what piety is? And Euthypro says, well, piety is what the gods tell us. And then the famous passage where Socrates addresses the question, is something pious because the gods say so? Or do the gods say that this thing is pious because it is, as a matter of fact, pious? I mean, do they say this because it's pious, or is it pious because they say so? Which way does it go? And Euthyphro just gets tied up in knots. And there you have the whole problem of voluntarism summarized. If you want to say that man's duty, or the good, or the pious, if you will, is based only on the will of God, then God could have as easily, or the gods could have as easily willed or decreed that murder be good and the protection of human life be evil as the opposite, as what we actually have in the world today. So to save the objectivity of ethics, to save the objectivity of ethics from the irrationality of the theologian, Plato said that the good is above even the will of the gods. Necessarily, The only thing in this life that fully captures the idea of goodness is the exercise of man's Reason, knowledgeable, living. There are some things in this world that appear to be good, but when we exercise them, they turn out to be bad. Peace looks good on the surface, but sometimes peace is a bad thing. War looks bad, but sometimes war can be a good thing. The only thing that is always good is the use of the reason to be reasonable or to act in a knowledgeable way. And therefore knowledge is virtue. According to Plato, knowledge is virtue. Virtue is the exercise of man's reason. And if that's the case, then nobody can ever reasonably do what is wrong. Anybody who's doing what is wrong is acting irrationally and consequently has not been using his reason, or to put it another way, is not knowing about the full character of his activities. Nobody ever knowingly does evil. Nobody would ever say, I know that eating this piece of fruit is dead wrong. God has forbidden isn't what I'm supposed to do, but I'm going to do it. Obviously, if somebody does an improper act, it's because they lack understanding, they are ignorant in some measure. Moreover, the most ignorant way to live and most unvirtuous way to live is to allow your passions to control your activity rather than your reason. Obviously, passions and appetites partake of the animal nature. In the material world, reason is splice off of a block of the eternal good, the immaterial, transcendent reality. Consequently, reason should dominate over the passions. This leads to a political theory which stands to reason, it seems to me, is what it is. Since reason must rule in the individual, the reasonable men must rule in society. Reasonable men are the philosophers, and thus you get the philosopher kings governing the state. In Plato's Republic, the philosopher kings divide people into different categories, into something of a threefold caste system. The upper category practices communism, a form of economic and family communism. All things held in common, even wives. And they rule in a totalitarian way over the middle class, the workmen, and over the soldiers, those who have to do the physical enforcement in society. Well, Plato finally develops then, what is the first and the classic deontological theory of ethics. It is not built on sense experience. It is a universal form of duty or obligation, and it is something that must be practiced regardless of the consequences. So all the characteristics of what we call classical deontologism are here. What are the difficulties? However, Plato gives us an objective and an authoritative norm, one that's independent of sensation, even independent of the gods, as I've already said. But in so doing, he has made the norm so abstract that it gives us no concrete guidance. Let us Assume that I could answer Socrates questions and I could say, I know what the good is. It is the form, the unchanging, unified, permanent form, essence, intuitive essence, conceptual essence, existing apart from the world form of the good. Well, having said all that and made it so formal and abstract, what does this mean I'm supposed to do? When it comes down to whether I help my neighbor, how we're supposed to treat criminals in society, how I treat my children and my family, how I use my money, what kind of sexual chastity or purity are going to be exercised, how do I make any concrete decisions having a knowledge of intuitive knowledge of this formal abstract good, there is no specific content to guide me. A second criticism that can be made as Mr. Frame makes in his syllabus, is that if all of reality is good, how can you distinguish good from evil? Well, you can say, well, evil is non existent and that's matter. So anything pertaining to the material world is evil. And certainly Platonic systems have developed from that that distinguish between values of the mind and spirit, piety over against pleasures of the body and involvement in day to day life. However, if all of reality is good, how can evil be said to exist at all? If evil is non existent, then evil is illusory. To say that it was evil for this man to rape that woman woman, we have to remember that rape is a physical act. And since the physical world is matter material, and since matter is evil and evil is non existent, it would seem we'd have to say that really didn't happen. Or it's only an illusion, or the classification of it as evil cannot stand. It is not some kind of permanent objective evaluation. We have another question here that has to be posed to Plato's deontologism. How do we know what the good is? Again, reason is supposed to be dominant. Recall what we said about Heraclitus and all the others, about the ambiguity of reason as well as the diversity of conclusions to which men using their reason come. I would question also the totalitarianism that Plato's philosophy naturally led to. The idea that the philosophers should be kings in a totalitarian sense. They should divide up society, practice communism and rule in a tyrannical way really over everybody else. It seems that you gain objectivity for ethics, but at the cost of individual freedom. Plato is unable to reconcile them, the one and the many in society. He gets unity for his society, but at the cost of the many who are not given any space to make up their own minds or to do their own things. Freedom is sacrificed then, for the good of society, you want to ask any questions in our remaining moments about Plato, the abstract or formalist in deontologism? Okay, then we'll take another break and return for another shot of the history of philosophy leading up to Kant.