UTOPIA

Soul Searching

Plato hints at this when he starts the Timaeus by reminding us of the principles of the Republic before presenting, within a long monologue by Timaeus that he himself calls a "myth", three different "forms" of man. The "ideal" of the Republic is evoked at the outset, before the myth starts, to show that it is outside space and time, while the three other "candidates" to the "form" of man are all to be found within the myth that describes the genesis of the universe and of man within it. One is the "form" of matter man and the world are made up from, displayed in the first "mathematical" model of matter, a model based on triangles. This is the "form" best understood by physicists, even though this specific model is utterly outdated by now. Another one is the "biological form" of his body, described through its pattern drawn by the lesser gods for the sole purpose of hosting the divine soul handed over by the demiourgos. This is the "form" best understood by physicians. The last is the "form" of his soul, the mixed principle of becoming and being, bridging between the visible and the intelligible, whose making by the demiourgos is described at length. This one is the "form" best understood by psychologists and maybe priests.

Indeed, man may satisfy himself with either one of these three explanations of himself. He may, like Gyges, the "earthly" man by his name, in the story told by Glaucon at the beginning of the Republic, move deep down in matter, within a cave opened by cosmic forces (the laws of physics, if you prefer) in search of his own self. But all he will find there is a dead body with a materialistic wooden soul shaped like an animal (the horse that serves as an image of the lower parts of the soul in the Phaedrus, but also a reminder of the Trojan horse, the fighting device which brought ruin over Greek cities) and unable to hold man's will. Though the body may look larger than nature under the scalpel of science, it is in fact a prisoner of this semblance of soul that is no more than the social and historical environment that surrounds and conditions him. But this materialistic science may also offer him the golden ring of a seemingly broken chain that will allow him to escape all responsibility in social life by making him invisible when looking at himself. This will allow him to use his eros in an egoistic way to win power by killing the king (the leading part of the soul) and to enslave his kinsmen in place of the sheep he was meant to oversee. Or he may listen to the teacher who will free him from his unfelt chains and lead him out of the cave where he was a prisoner, and up the hill all the way to the sight of the good itself. Then, and only then, knowing the true eternal ideal of man, may he go back in the cave built for him by god, to help his kinsmen free themselves.

The misery of man is to be balked of the sight of essence and to be stuffed with conjectures; but the supreme good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else than knowledge; the fairest fortune that can befall man is to be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is the essence of justice,- to attend every one his own: nay, the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except through direct contemplation of the divine essence. Courage then for "the persuasion that we must search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison, better, braver and more industrious than if we thought it impossible to discover what we do not know, and useless to search for it."This, then, might be the inverse of which Plato the philosopher had envisaged to be the Utopia of perfectionism.

All philosophy, of East and West, has the same centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity, the mind returns from the one to that which is not one, but other or many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of variety, the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other. These strictly-blended elements it is the problem of thought to separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mutually contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other that we can never say what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as nimble in the highest as in the lowest grounds; when we contemplate the one, the true, the good,- as in the surfaces and extremities of matter. In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagwad Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana.