PHILOSOPHICAL

MYSTICISM IN PLATO,
HEGEL, AND THE
PRESENT
 ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY

Plato and Plotinus on Mysticism, Epistemology, and Ethics, David J. Yount

Plato’s Trial of Athens, Mark A. Ralkowski
Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics: New Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology,
Mikel Burley
Hegel, Logic and Speculation, ed. by Paolo Diego Bubbio, Alessandro De Cesaris,
Maurizio Pagano, Hager Weslati
PHILOSOPHICAL
MYSTICISM IN PLATO,
HEGEL, AND THE
PRESENT

Robert M. Wallace
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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This book is dedicated to my wife and muse,
Kathleen Ritger Kouzmanoff.
vi 
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viii
Preface x

Introduction 1

1 “A Worm! A God!” 9

2 “That Which Shows God in Me, Fortifies Me” 29

3 Freedom and Full Reality 67

4 Full Reality Is God 87

5 Plato’s Progress 105

6 Plato, Freedom, and Us 135

7 Plato on Reason, Love, and Inspiration 157

8 Plato on “Becoming Like God” 185

9 Ordinary and Extraordinary Experiences of God 205

Appendix: Comparisons Between the Plato/Hegel Argument for a

God Within Us, and Several Well-Known Arguments for God 213
Notes 218
Bibliography 251
Index 263
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M
y father introduced me to his favorite writers and philosophers, generously
sharing his enthusiasms with the young me. My mother made sure that
I had a constant stream of books to explore. Teachers, especially Alan
Strain, fed my sense of what might be possible. My slowly growing understanding
of Plato owes a great deal to Terence Irwin, Gail Fine, Lloyd Gerson, J. N. Findlay,
Rosemary Desjardins, Francisco Gonzales, James Rhodes, H. J. Krämer, G. W.
F. Hegel, and Jelaluddin Rumi. In German philosophy, Alan Montefiore, Hans
Blumenberg, Karsten Harries, and Allen Wood got me started on my way. In
transatlantic correspondence and phone calls, Blumenberg’s nurturing spirit was
an inspiration to me. I would also like to mention Darrel E. Christensen, who
suggested to me some decades ago that “what we really need” is to understand what
Hegel and Whitehead have in common—a comment whose wisdom I only came to
understand and appreciate much later. In mysticism, I owe a great deal to Kathleen
Kouzmanoff, Aldous Huxley (in his The Perennial Philosophy [1945]), Jonathan
Shear, Jeffrey Kripal, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Rumi. In proper
Platonic fashion, what I owe to Kathy is inseparably intellectual (see her Lifewheel
[2005]), emotional, and spiritual. I am grateful to anonymous readers who have
encouraged and challenged my manuscripts in various ways. Mehmet Tabak gave
me very helpful written comments on part of this book. Friends with whom I’ve
profited from discussing these issues include David Duveneck, Graham Andrews,
Stephen Theron, Sebastian Job, Ishmael Wallace, Meg Wallace, Tom Bennigson,
Barry Goldensohn, Ted Mazza, Ian Johnson, Will Altman, John Bardis, Paul de
Angelis, David Brent, Josef Bieniek, Ben Campbell, Robert Stern, Jeff Edwards,
Allegra de Laurentiis, Ken Westphal, Willem deVries, Karl Ameriks, Jim Wetzel,
John Clark, John Placer, Tushar Irani, John Russell, Michael Wakoff, Giacomo
Rinaldi, Marco DeAngelis, Gunter Scholtz, Lenny Moss, Wallace Pinfold, Harrison
Fluss, Allen Mathews, Conrad Paul, Jane Paul, Elizabeth Reed, Jay Bregman, John
Uebersax, Edward Butler, Thomas Burns, and Samantha Horst. As always, nobody
other than me is responsible for what I’ve failed to learn from them!
I am also grateful to Bertrand Russell, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor, Gregory
Vlastos, Martha Nussbaum, and R. C. Zaehner for posing issues forthrightly in
their influential writings, to which admirers of Plato and Hegel can benefit
by articulating a detailed response. And of course I’m deeply grateful to my
protagonists, Plato, Hegel, Emerson, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Findlay, Murdoch,
Sellars, McDowell, Rödl, and the poets.
My greatest personal debts are to my mother, Margaret Marston Wallace,
my father, Robert S. Wallace Jr., and my incomparable wife, Kathleen Ritger
Kouzmanoff. Thanks also to my children, Ishmael, Vita, Nina, and Meg, all “trailing
clouds of glory,” for all that they’ve taught me and the fun that we’ve shared.
I would also like to thank Liza Thompson at Bloomsbury for her support for
this project, and Lucy Russell at Bloomsbury, Leeladevi Ulaganathan at Deanta,
and Katharina Munk at Klarso GmbH for their help and their patience.

A cknowledgments   ix
PREFACE

P
hilosophical mysticism is the doctrine that we sometimes have direct
knowledge of a higher reality or God. Although present-day reference
works in philosophy seldom mention philosophical mysticism, Plato,
who founded academic philosophy, was widely and uncontroversially known
for millennia as (among other things) a “mystic.” And versions of philosophical
mysticism were still common in the early twentieth century, in Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead, and others. But since then, with the rise of
logical positivism and other anti-metaphysical doctrines, philosophical mysticism
has largely ceased to be taught in philosophy departments. My goal in this book is
to revive it as a subject of serious study.
Since it is philosophical, philosophical mysticism doesn’t neglect reason; nor
is the direct knowledge that is its topic restricted to any small group of people.
And the higher reality to which philosophical mysticism draws our attention has
implications for numerous perennial problems besides that of God. Within the
framework of this higher reality, the issues of science versus religion, fact versus
value, rationality versus ethics, intellect versus emotions, mind versus body, and
knowers versus the “external world” all become tractable. It turns out that nature,
freedom, science, ethics, the arts, and a rational religion-in-the-making constitute
an intelligible whole. This is very different from the muddle in which these issues
tend to be left by such familiar agnostic doctrines as empiricism, materialism,
naturalism, existentialism, and postmodernism.
This is why such major figures in philosophy, religion, and literature as
Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel,
William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Alfred North
Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein have all been strongly attracted to Plato’s
idea that we can and do know a higher reality. My goal in this book is to show how
this attraction and this idea are fully justified and to explore their consequences.
Readers who don’t have an extensive knowledge of Western philosophy might
like to begin by reading Chapters 1 and 9, which presuppose little specialized
knowledge and provide an overview of what the book is about. I have tried to
make the book as a whole clear enough to be accessible for any motivated reader.
INTRODUCTION

There if anywhere should a person live his life, beholding that Beauty.
PLATO, SYMPOSIUM 211D

The Platonic philosophical theology unifies us with ourselves, with each other,
with the world, and with God, by explaining that a higher reality or God is present
in this world and in us inasmuch as it inspires our efforts toward inner freedom,
love, beauty, truth, and other ideals. These efforts give us a unity, as “ourselves,”
that we can’t have insofar as we’re the slaves of our genes, hormones, opinions,
self-importance, and so forth. For in contrast to our genes and so forth, which are
implanted in us or are reactions to what surrounds us, efforts toward ideals like
inner freedom, love, beauty, and truth are more likely to reflect our own choice.
So that if anything reflects “us,” ourselves, and not just our surroundings, they do.
So through ideals like inner freedom, love, beauty, and truth, something that’s
“higher,” because it’s free and fully “us,” is in us. Since we often fall short of it and
lapse into merely reactive or merely bodily functioning, we can call this higher self-
determination, by contrast, “divine.” And there’s nothing that we know better or
more directly than we know this inner choice that we make, to be either automatic
and reactive or free and self-determining. So we have every reason to regard the
choice as real, and our awareness of it as knowledge. And since “mysticism” is the
name for the doctrine that we have direct knowledge of a higher reality or God,
and this Platonic train of thought shows how we have such knowledge through
awareness of our inner choices, it shows how mysticism in this sense is entirely
rational.1
Since we often fall short of inner freedom, love, beauty, and truth, they have
the “transcendence” that we expect of religion. They are inspiring as well as
rational, “above” us as well as “in” us. But what’s remarkable is that because this
transcendence is rational, it’s a feature not only of the higher reality that mysticism
and religion celebrate but also of science. In fact, because science is one of the
ways in which we choose to pursue truth and thus transcend our genes, hormones,
favorite opinions, and self-importance, science is a part or an aspect of the higher
reality that mysticism and religion celebrate.
Of course when I say that religion celebrates a transcendence that’s rational,
I’m not referring to everything that we refer to as religion, but primarily to what
Alfred North Whitehead called “religion in the making”—that is, the religion that
has been in process of emergence for millennia and is probably not yet in its final
form. But as we will see, this religion in the making incorporates everything that
seems to be essential to traditional religions, including not only transcendence but
also conceptions that are comparable to creation, sin, and salvation. It’s probably
intimations of the cogency of this religion in the making that have given traditional
religions the longevity that they have had.
So rather than inherently conflicting with mysticism and religion, science is a
part of the higher reality that mysticism and religion celebrate. Religion and science
both transcend by seeking inner freedom and truth. It’s just that science, being
restricted to what we can know by scientific methods, is narrower. It’s only one
aspect of the transcendent freedom, love, beauty, and truth, the higher reality, that
religion or religion in the making celebrates. This unusual way of understanding
the relation between science and religion can free us from a good deal of mental
fog and fruitless disputation.
But the relation of science to religion isn’t the only familiar issue that the Platonic
higher reality transforms. It’s probably evident from what I’ve said that the Platonic
higher reality reveals an intimate connection between “fact” and “value.” A world
in which there was no pursuit of values like love, beauty, and truth, or (as Plato
puts it) “the Good,” would not be self-determining or fully “itself.” If being fully
“itself ” is the most intensive kind of reality, such a world would lack what’s most
real. By directing our attention to the role of value in what’s most real, Platonism
shows the limits of the “disenchanted” and “value-free” account of reality that we
associate with scientific objectivity. Important though it is, the reality that science
identifies is not the ultimate reality. The reality apart from itself that science in
its normal activities identifies is not, in fact, the ultimate reality of which science
itself, as a pursuit of truth and thus of self-determination, is an aspect. When
science becomes aware of this ultimate reality to which it contributes, and which
depends on values such as truth as well as freedom, love, and beauty, it becomes
evident that the ultimate “fact” or reality is not actually independent of “value.”
Next, there is the issue of our relations to each other. We usually assume that
we’re external to and separate from each other. But if I am to govern myself fully,
and thus be fully “myself,” I can’t have things affecting me from outside, so I can’t
be external to others. So to be fully myself, I must go beyond selfishness or mutual
“externality,” and instead love everyone and treat everyone ethically. We are
external to each other in reality as we ordinarily conceive it, but not in the higher
reality in which, through freedom, love, beauty, and truth, we are fully ourselves.

2   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

From the ordinary point of view, the statement that we’re most ourselves when
we’re not external to others probably seems like a paradox, but to lovers it’s simply
the truth.
From what I’ve just said, it’s clear that the Platonic view will also bridge the gap
that we often experience between intellect and love or intellect and emotions in
general. Of course many of our feelings reflect genes, hormones, or experiences of
which we may have little memory. But intellect, seeking freedom and wholeness,
always asks, Does this feeling make sense, in the context of my other feelings and
beliefs? And when the feeling doesn’t seem to make sense in this way, intellect
tries to help us to clarify the confusion, and thus to rise to feelings, such as those
associated with ethics and love, that reflect greater freedom and wholeness.
So rather than rejecting the body and its feelings (which would be a recipe for
unfreedom), intellect helps it to be more free, self-governing, and real as an aspect
of “oneself.”
Then there is “mind,” in general. Since it’s through mind that we achieve
freedom, wholeness, and so forth, mind can’t be a separate being that interacts
with a “body” and with “other minds.” Again, such exclusion would prevent
the mind from being fully self-governing or free. To be fully self-governing and
free, mind must be a higher degree of reality in which bodies cease to function
merely as bodies and as separate from others. Mind as the organ of free thought
transcends limits.
And this also resolves the modern “problem of knowledge.” We wonder how a
mind can know a world that is “external” to it. But this problem doesn’t arise if in
the fullest reality, in which we’re fully self-governing and fully ourselves, nothing
is separate from and consequently nothing is external to anything else. In that
fullest reality, the “things” that we ordinarily think of as separate from us are either
equally self-governing and real, in which case we aren’t really separate from them
or external to them and we know them all “from inside,” or they are less self-
governing, in which case they are less real and the knowledge that we have of them
will be through whatever they contribute to what is self-governing and fully real.
The fundamental notion, in all of this, of a unifying rational activity, and thus
a higher degree of freedom and reality “as oneself,” which is sometimes achieved
by what is otherwise less rational, less unified, less free, and less real as itself, is
not as familiar as it may have been in the days of Plato and of Hegel. Most recent
philosophy has assumed, by contrast, that reality isn’t “more real” or “less real” but
is simply a “yes” or “no” issue of existence or nonexistence; and that we are either
rational or irrational, free or unfree, but not both. But Plato and his successors
make a good case that we experience greater and lesser degrees of freedom and of
reality as ourselves when we are more or less integrated, self-determining, or “in
charge of our lives.” So the notion of a higher degree of freedom and reality which
is continuous with lower degrees of freedom and reality, need not be as exotic as
it sounds.

INTRODUCTION   3
 The Platonic conceptions certainly contrast with “common sense,” which (today
at least) leans more toward a reductive materialism or naturalism for which there
may not be any freedom or, consequently, any reality that depends on it. But the
Platonic conceptions become more plausible when we see how many aspects of
our lives they clarify, including our personal functioning, mind, body, love, value,
ethics, knowledge, science, and religion. Indeed, the comprehensiveness of the
alternative to “common sense” that these conceptions present is one reason to take
them seriously. Like powerful proposals in the physical sciences (Galileo, Newton,
Einstein), they enable us to see unity in phenomena whose relationship to each
other was previously unclear.
In Chapter 1 and in portions of later chapters, I unfold the Platonic view in
more detail in my own voice. In the remainder of this Introduction I sum up how
the book draws on and explains Plato and his successors, down to the present.
To the best of my knowledge, my four chapters on Plato are the only treatment
that explains how Plato solves the religion/science, value/fact, ethics/rationality,
emotion/intellect, body/mind, and “external world”/knower problems in one
swoop, through his conception of rational “ascent” in the Phaedo, Republic,
Symposium, Timaeus, Theaetetus, Parmenides, and other dialogues. In doing this,
the book presents replies to many of Plato’s influential critics, including David
Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Walter Bröcker,
Gregory Vlastos, Richard Rorty, Hans Blumenberg, and Martha Nussbaum. The
many modern philosophers who have rejected what they think of as “Platonism”
have failed to appreciate Plato’s most important discovery, which is the discovery
of how we experience a higher reality in ourselves.
Aristotle, who criticizes Plato’s way of describing the higher reality, agrees with
him about its existence and importance: “The best is . . . to understand what is fine
and divine, by being itself either divine or the most divine element in us.”2 Hegel
has the same view, maintaining (for example) that “it is not the finite which is the
real, but the infinite.”3 Aristotle and Hegel agree with Plato that through a kind of
rational “ascent,” we experience something that’s self-governing and thus higher
and essentially divine. In this way, contrary to what’s often suggested, Aristotle
and Hegel are both entirely serious in what they say about God and the divine, and
they both endorse a significant kind of “transcendence.” Indeed, and here I
depart from the majority of recent commentators on Hegel, the transcendence
that Hegel endorses is more truly transcendent than competing conceptions. So
that describing Hegel as someone who advocates “naturalism” and rejects the
“supernatural” is very misleading. What tempts people to call Hegel an advocate
of “naturalism” is that he is not a dualist. But what Hegel (like Aristotle and much
of Plato) aims to show us is precisely that a notion of rational “ascent” need not
entail dualism. It needn’t entail dualism if we ourselves engage in and experience
transcendence, so that the transcendent and the immanent are united in our
experience.

4   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

 So what Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel have in common, and what (as I will
show) Emerson, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, John Niemeyer Findlay, Iris Murdoch,
Sebastian Rödl, and others also describe in various ways, is the nexus of a
transcendent (higher) freedom, love, and God. Which when it’s well understood
unites science and religion, fact and value, rational self-government and ethics,
intellect and emotion, body and mind, and the “external world” and knowers in
the ways that I’ve indicated.
I give details on how these views are expressed in post-Hegelian writers from
Emerson to the present in Chapter 2. There I also discuss the influential recent and
contemporary philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell, who sympathize
with Hegel in certain respects but don’t appear to embrace the idea of a higher
reality, as such. I give my own account of Hegel in Chapters 2–4 (referring readers
to my book on Hegel for further details). Chapter 3 contains a general introduction
to Hegel that aims to clear up a number of the issues that people commonly raise
about him. And Chapters 5–8 deal with Plato.
I want to say a bit more, here, about the difficult relationship during the last
hundred years between philosophy and “mysticism.” Alfred North Whitehead
and Ludwig Wittgenstein were among the participants in a broad philosophical
discussion, which took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
also involved Francis Herbert Bradley, William James, Bertrand Russell, and Henri
Bergson, and which dealt with what many of the participants called “mysticism.”
Bradley, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein were all inspired by Plato, either directly or
through Hegel or Schopenhauer. But this discussion was broken off during most of
the twentieth century because philosophers beginning with Russell weren’t able to
make sense of Bradley, of Whitehead, or of Wittgenstein’s notion of “the mystical.” And
recent accounts of early twentieth-century philosophy, examining it from the point of
view of what followed it, have paid little or no attention to its discussion of mysticism.
My own account explains how Bradley, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein were all
trying in various ways to articulate the same notion that’s central for Plato and
for Hegel, which is the notion of ascent to a more self-governing and thus higher
reality. Hegel’s central operation of “sublation” or Aufhebung ascends to a higher
reality, as do Whitehead’s “victory of persuasion over force”4 and Wittgenstein’s
“ladder,” in the Tractatus. The goal that Wittgenstein described there as “value,”
“God,” and “the mystical,” he described in a Platonic image in his notebooks as
“the true world among shadows.”5
This notion of ascent to the true world was inspired, in all of these thinkers,
by the observation that we seem to be able to question what our appetites, our
opinions, and our self-importance urge us to do and believe. Questioning them,
we seek a higher source of guidance—what Plato refers to as the “Good,” Hegel
calls the “Idea” or “Spirit,” and Whitehead and Wittgenstein call “value” and “God.”
They all regard this higher source of guidance not only as more authoritative
but also (as Plato and Hegel put it) as more “real” in that it’s a self-governing or

INTRODUCTION   5
self-determining whole, and thus real “as itself ” and not merely as a product of
an endless series of external causes. Wittgenstein conveys this thought in his
Notebooks (which are in some respects more Platonic, and less unfortunately
dualistic, than his Tractatus) by comparing the higher reality, as the “good life,”
to a work of art: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and
the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis.”6 The good life is the world
seen in the way in which we are able to see a mere “object” as (actually) a work of
art, governed by its own internal logic rather than by external causes, and thus
real, as I say, “as itself.” To see the world and life in it in this way is to ascend to
a reality that’s more real in that it’s more self-governing and more “itself ” than
we often take the world and life to be. It’s to ascend to “the true world among
shadows.”
So this more real reality is what the whole early-twentieth-century group
composed of Bradley the “Hegelian,” Whitehead the “Platonist,” and Wittgenstein
who had initially been inspired by Schopenhauer were trying to get into focus. And
when we understand this interest that they shared, we can resume the investigation
that was abandoned for more than half a century by analytic philosophers
including Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, W. V. O. Quine, and their successors, who
had no notion of what Bradley, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein had been looking for.
Relatively recent writers who do have an idea of what the early-twentieth-
century philosophical “mystics” were after include Michael Polanyi in his Personal
Knowledge (1958), J. N. Findlay in his Discipline of the Cave and Transcendence of
the Cave (1966–67), Iris Murdoch in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1993),
Sebastian Rödl in his Self-Consciousness (2007) and other works, and Wolfram
Gobsch in his 2012 dissertation, “Bedingungen des Unbedingten.”
Findlay and Murdoch both have a strong affinity for Plato, and like Wittgenstein
in his Tractatus, both of them are unfortunately somewhat prone to a dualism
which renders their overall view questionable and incomplete. Findlay contrasts
“this world” and “another world or worlds” in a way that unintentionally casts
doubt on the unity of human experience and reason.7 And Murdoch’s focus is so
exclusively on art, ethics, and religion that she gives no idea how we might relate
her very interesting results in those fields to the view of reality that we’re likely to
find in the natural sciences.
Fortunately Plato in most of his work, and Aristotle, Hegel, Whitehead, Polanyi,
Rödl, and Gobsch avoid Findlay’s dualism of “this world” and “another world”
by understanding what Findlay calls the “other world” as an aspect of this world
and of our experience in it. And they avoid Murdoch’s implicit dualism of the
humanities versus the natural sciences by pointing out how by aiming at truth as
such, as opposed to whatever our genes, hormones, self-importance, and so forth,
direct us toward, science itself elevates us above “nature” understood as a realm of
genes, hormones, self-importance, and so forth. Thus science embodies the same
“ascent” toward greater self-government that all Platonists identify in art, ethics,

6   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

and God. So insofar as it’s aware of the nature of its own activity, science can’t deny
the reality of the Platonic “ascent.”
So we see that, so far from being “optional,” Platonic ascent and the higher
and most real domain of the “mystical” are woven into every aspect of our
lives, including science itself. Insofar as we succeed, in science, art, love, ethics,
or religion, in being rationally self-governing, we participate in the most real
reality, by which we are all irresistibly inspired. Each of these domains has its own
internal logic, which when we understand it as such can’t be opposed to the others
(since that would make it no longer self-governing), but must be a part of the all-
subsuming process of rational self-government as such.
As a result of common misunderstandings of Hegel, neither Whitehead nor
Polanyi read much of what Hegel wrote, so their broad agreement with him is
a result not of direct influence but of the fact that all three of them drew on the
broadly Platonic tradition. Findlay wrote a book about Hegel, but he doesn’t seem
to have understood Hegel’s critique of dualism. Whitehead and Polanyi in effect
rediscovered a great deal of what Hegel had discovered with the help of Plato and of
writers influenced by Plato. And Whitehead and Polanyi themselves have not been
as widely read or understood as they deserve to be. The dominant materialism or
“naturalism” of our age makes it difficult for people to envision the possibility of a
coherent alternative view, such as the Platonic tradition presents. Despite the work
of thinkers like Hegel, Whitehead, and Polanyi, many writers still suppose that
the only likely alternative to materialism or naturalism is a dualism such as we see
in Kant, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in Findlay, or (implicitly) in Iris Murdoch—
which, insofar as it doesn’t clarify the relation between its two domains, can’t be
fully satisfying to the intellect.
Some critics of the currently dominant materialism or naturalism, such as
Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception
of Nature Is Almost Certainly False [2012]), nevertheless do indicate sympathy
for the alternative that Plato and Hegel outline.8 And a group of philosophers
including John McDowell and Michael Thompson at Pittsburgh, Sebastian Rödl,
Andrea Kern, and Wolfram Gobsch at Leipzig, and Irad Kimhi at Chicago have
recently been developing a metaphysics and an account of knowledge and action
that chime well with what I find in Plato, Hegel, Whitehead, and Polanyi.9
These recent writers focus in various ways on the dimension of “ascent,” of
what’s “higher” in reality, which Plato, Hegel, Whitehead, and Polanyi elaborate
and on which I focus in this book. They all address the apparent conflict between
the third-person, “scientific” account of what we are and the first-person,
“humanistic” view which is presupposed by much of our practical thinking. When
Plato, Hegel, and their successors point out that science itself is an attempt to rise
above merely reactive functioning and to be led instead by truth, so that science’s
objective, external, third-person gaze is in fact a means to our inner, first-person
goal of being self-governing by pursuing truth, they show how science and the

INTRODUCTION   7
humanistic view, external and internal, body and mind, nature and freedom, and
“lower” and “higher” are ultimately one. Since the higher pole that is internal,
mind, and freedom is self-governing and real as itself, in a way that the lower pole
that is external, body, and nature is not, the higher can be seen as subsuming the
lower as an aspect of itself.10 In which case science is an aspect of the humanistic
view, the external is an aspect of the internal, and nature is an aspect of boundless,
undivided, self-governing freedom.
This view is a version of “idealism” insofar as it makes ideas or thought, by
which we are self-governing, essential to full reality. But it differs importantly from
George Berkeley’s and Immanuel Kant’s versions of idealism in that it focuses,
precisely, on the difference between what I’m calling full reality or reality “as
oneself ” and ordinary reality. Rather than being mere “appearance,” as Berkeley
and Kant say or imply, ordinary reality as Plato says “is and is not” (Republic 477a):
it is in one respect perfectly real (it “is”) while in regard to self-government and
reality “as oneself,” it “is not.” Sticks and stones and remote galaxies certainly exist
apart from us and our minds. It’s only in regard to self-government and the reality
“as oneself ” that it creates, that sticks, stones, and galaxies have less of something
of which animals that are capable of rational self-government have more.
I’ll say more about this kind of “idealism” in Chapters 1 and 2. The notion
of a higher degree of reality, reality as oneself, changes the entire landscape of
philosophical issues. Since the question of whether one is governing oneself and
thus is fully oneself underlies all of our issues about “inner” and “outer,” mind
and body, freedom and nature, emotion and intellect, values and facts, ethics and
rationality, and religion and science, it’s only by understanding it that we can avoid
ongoing confusion about these issues.
This changed philosophical landscape also makes it clear how much our culture
in general needs a certain kind of philosophy. For rather than an exploration of
abstruse issues that are of interest primarily to specialists, the Plato/Hegel kind
of philosophy is a systematic effort to clarify issues—freedom, mind, value, love,
ethics, science, religion—with which every one of us is involved in one way or
another. I am eager for the clarity and the increased freedom which we will enjoy
when the Plato/Hegel philosophical landscape is more widely understood and
appreciated.
Chapter 1 gives a second introduction to the book, in my own voice and with
little reference to previous writers, and follows that with a more detailed overview
of what the book finds in Plato and Hegel, in particular.

8   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

1 “A WORM! A GOD!”

Helpless immortal! insect infinite!

A worm! a god!—I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost.
EDWARD YOUNG, NIGHT THOUGHTS

How could we “know God,” whether directly or indirectly? What would that even
mean? Are there real values, or does it all boil down to what we’re programmed
to want? Is there a sense in which we actually are “one” with each other? What do
my inner life and my freedom, as I experience them, have to do with my body, my
neurons, and the natural world, which I and others can observe?
To explore these questions, I begin by asking another question: Who are we,
really? Most of us, I suggest, are in an ongoing identity crisis.1 A higher reality of
inner freedom (which means making up our own minds) and truth and love and
beauty is in this world and us, and we experience it directly when we remember
it and try to live up to it.2 This higher reality of inner freedom, truth, love, and
beauty inspires us, while lower goals merely attract us. But of course we also have
a huge capacity for temporarily forgetting the higher reality, and pursuing lower
goals without regard to inner freedom and the rest.
We usually assume that this familiar conflict of goals has nothing to do with
who someone is. We suppose that someone is the same person regardless of
whether the goals that she pursues are, in anyone’s opinion, “higher” or “lower.”
But a contrasting view is in fact influential in the philosophical tradition beginning
with Socrates and Plato. This tradition argues that pursuing inner freedom and
truth makes a person more real, more herself, and more of a person, in a way that
(say) simply pursuing money or fame does not.
The examined life
Plato suggests that this is why Socrates promoted the “examined life.” Someone
who examines her life, Plato suggests, by thinking about what’s really worth doing
and what’s really true rather than just doing whatever she initially feels drawn to, is
more fully herself.3 If, in the example that I mentioned, I lost my desire for money
or my desire for fame, I myself would presumably still be all there. I would still be
the same person. But if, on the other hand, I lost my thinking and was left with
nothing but unexamined desires and opinions, I would be, in effect, an automaton
rather than a person. So at least part of what makes me a person, and thus makes
me fully myself, is my examining or thinking about what’s really worth doing and
what’s really true: my “making up my own mind.”
This is why rather than just attracting us, inner freedom or making up our
own minds, and truth, love, and beauty (insofar as love and beauty embody inner
freedom and truth) inspire us. They represent our full presence, our being fully
ourselves. This also explains the fact that having to choose between the higher and
the lower, between what inspires us and what merely attracts us, is a “crisis” rather
than just an ordinary decision. In choosing between the higher and the lower, we
decide what kind of being we are going to be.

Higher and lower identities

This notion of a crisis in which we have to choose between higher and lower
identities may remind us of traditional religious themes having to do with higher
and lower: the sacred and the profane, God and our sinful nature, conversion from
the lower and salvation by the higher. It also pervades the writing of philosophers
and poets who don’t appear to be motivated by (at least) conventional forms of
religion. Philosophers from Plato to Rödl explain how through inner freedom,
truth, love, and beauty we experience something higher in the world and in
ourselves. Poets and creative writers such as Edward Young, Jelaluddin Rumi, Walt
Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, and Mary Oliver conjure up this
same experience.
Much of Asian thought, likewise, speaks of something higher which we can
experience in ourselves and in the world, whether it’s the “Tao that cannot be
named,” or “Brahman” that’s identical to our soul, or the “Buddha nature” that’s
in everything but at the same time is truer and thus higher than what it’s in. There
is more overlap between Asian and Western thought on these issues than we
generally realize.4
Both Asian teachers and the Plato/Hegel tradition tell us that the central issue
is not, as we in the West often suppose, about a separate “supreme being” that a
person may or may not “believe in.” Rather, the central issue is the nature of the

10   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

world of which we’re a part. Is it, as we tend to assume, essentially “all on one
level,” or does it have a “vertical” dimension by which some aspects of it really are
“higher,” through inner freedom, truth, love, and beauty?

The higher as the divine

If some aspects of the world really are higher, one might well think that these
are the core of truth in the traditional notions of the sacred, God, conversion,
salvation, and worship. In that case, the higher authority of inner freedom, truth,
love, and beauty might be the reality that believers in a separate “supreme being”
are trying, with only partial success, to get into focus.
We do usually imagine God as a being that’s separate from the world. But there
may be a surprise in store here, for someone who considers the question carefully.
It turns out that a God who’s separate from the world can’t really transcend (go
beyond) the world. This is because a God who’s separate from the world would
be, as the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner put it, “a member of the larger household
of all reality,” which would be composed of these two separate objects, God and
the world.5 But a God who had the same kind of reality as the other members of a
larger household wouldn’t be truly “higher” than them, or transcendent. However
much more “powerful” than the world this “God” might be, it would still be, in an
important way, the same kind of thing as the world, and to that extent it wouldn’t
transcend the world—or deserve to have authority over it.

Transcendence through innerness

How can God transcend the world and deserve to have authority over it, if not by
being a separate and very powerful being? The answer that’s suggested by Plato
and a long line of religious thinkers is that a God who’s not a separate being can
be distinguished from the world and higher than it by being more “inner” than it,
more free, self-governing, loving, and beautiful. God could be the “inside” of the
world.6 Since such a God isn’t alongside the world as its equal in a larger household
of all reality, such a God can truly go beyond the world (transcend it). Rather than
failing to transcend, by being separate and alongside, it transcends by being more
inner, free, self-governing, loving, and beautiful.
In which case, it’s clear how God has a kind of authority that’s entirely distinct
from “power” as we usually conceive of it. And it’s through this authority, and
only through it, that God transcends everything. In our earliest encounters with
something radically different and awe-inspiring, we might not have come up
with a better word than “power.” But sheer physical power, which isn’t oriented to
any conception of the good, integrates nothing and thus achieves nothing that’s

“A WORM! A GOD!”    11
“itself,” fully real, or (indeed) truly different. By contrast, selfhood, freedom, love,
beauty, and rational authority integrate to a maximum degree and thus make it
clear how rather than being something merely to fear and placate, God deserves
worship (that is, reverence and devotion) as something that’s truly higher (more
authoritative) than us.
We are conditioned to think of the “creator” as distinguished primarily by the
sheer “power” that the act of creation implies, while we bow occasionally toward
the notion that this power is somehow mysteriously combined with love and other
admirable qualities. In doing this we fail to give this creator any authority over
its creation beyond the authority of its power to “punish and reward.” We forget
that a power of that kind deserves no reverence or devotion, being no different in
principle from the power of a tyrant.
Whereas the ability to integrate, to be whole through freedom, love, and beauty,
gives its possessor a kind of reality, through self-integration, that tyrants don’t
begin to possess. The possessor of this integration deserves authority over the
world that seeks integration and only intermittently achieves it. But it’s precisely
not “separate” from that world, because what’s separate is in a crucial way the same
as what it’s separate from; it exists “alongside,” belongs to the same “household”
as the world. Whereas integration, by going “within,” truly achieves something
that the world, regarded merely as such, as “external” and “side-by-side,” does not
achieve.
Although conceptions of God as in some way “internal” rather than “separate”
don’t play much of a role in public discussion today, they have in fact been quite
common in Western religious thought. Figures like St Paul (in God “we live and
move and have our being”), St Athanasius (God “became man that we might
become God”), and St Augustine (“You were more inward [to me] than my most
inward part”) can be cited in early Christianity. In modern times, Hegel, Alfred
North Whitehead, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner likewise speak of God in ways
that aren’t consistent with God’s being a separate being.7 Because they don’t
identify God with the world but retain a distinction between them, these views are
not “pantheistic.” Distinct and higher but not separate and not “a being,” their God
may “create” the world by making it self-determined and fully real, rather than by
existing before the world in time and “deciding” to create it.

An objection to this conception

Could it be that since many people do think of God as a separate being, someone
who describes God as “distinct but not separate” is really just changing the subject,
by not discussing what many people call “God”?
What’s important for my purposes is simply that what we’re talking about is
truly transcendent, deserves to have authority, and is free, loving, beautiful, and

12   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

accessible to us. The conception of “God” as a separate being, on the other hand,
resembles the earlier habits of thinking of God as like a human being or like an
animal, in that it makes God resemble something that we’re familiar with. These
conceptions prevent God from really transcending, really going beyond the
ordinary world, and from having the authority that such transcendence would
carry with it. So anyone who wants their God to transcend the world and have the
authority that goes with that will want to consider the Plato/Hegel God seriously.
Here’s a comparison. In recent times we have learned something new about
the substance that we call “water,” which for a long time we described as a simple
“element.” Water, it turns out, is actually a composite, made up of atoms of
hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly, we may learn something new about the “God”
whom many of us habitually describe as a separate being. We may learn that this
“God” is actually distinct but not separate from the “lower” beings that make
up the world. We wouldn’t learn this by empirical investigation, as we did in the
case of water, but we would learn it. These stories show how we are able to talk
about the same thing, essentially, while our conception of what that thing is, is
undergoing change.
Just as we were correct in thinking that water flows, is capable of freezing and
boiling, is transparent, and so forth, so we have also been correct in thinking that
“God” transcends ordinary beings like us and has great authority as a result of
that transcendence. In both cases, we have also been mistaken about significant
features of what we’re talking about, but that doesn’t prevent us from talking,
throughout our learning process, of what is essentially the same thing. In this way,
it should be possible to compare differing conceptions of “God” without throwing
up our hands and saying that we’re just not discussing the same subject.
This is my reply to critics of the “philosophers’ God” who assert, like Henri
Bergson, that “religion . . . regards [God], above all, as a Being who can hold
communication with us,” so that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle “are speaking
to us of something else” (Bergson [1935], p. 241). Bergson doesn’t address the
question of how God can deserve to have authority over us, nor does he perceive
how the Plato/Aristotle/Hegel God is free, loving, beautiful, and deeply involved
in our lives at every point.
We have certainly learned in the course of time that our “communication” with
this “Being” (to use these terms for a moment) is different from our communication
with each other. If it weren’t different, the “Being” wouldn’t be infinite and wouldn’t
have the authority that it does. This would likewise be my reply to objections that
the Plato/Aristotle/Hegel God doesn’t seem like a “person.” (I’ll say some more
about this issue in Chapter 2.) Regarding the notion of God as “an existing thing”
(or “a Being,” as Bergson puts it), Iris Murdoch says, “No existing thing could
be what we have meant by God. Any existing God would be less than God. . . .
But what led us to conceive of [God] does exist and is constantly experienced and
pictured” (Murdoch [1993], p. 508).

“A WORM! A GOD!”    13
 I am also impressed, of course, by the fact that central thinkers in Christianity
and in other religious traditions have taught a concept of God which does not make
God a separate being. For all of these reasons, I propose to use the term “God” for
something that transcends by being more inner, free, and loving rather than by being
separate. If you prefer to use the word “God” for something else, that’s fine. We just
need to be clear about what each of us is talking about, at any point in our discussion.

A God whom we can know

Besides being free, loving, the source of all full reality, and truly transcendent
because it doesn’t fall like us into the category of a separate being, a God who is
distinct but not separate is accessible to us; it’s a God whom we can know. If this
God is distinct from the world by being more “inner” than it, more free, true,
loving, and beautiful, but isn’t a separate being, then this God’s innerness, its
freedom, truth, and so forth, can’t be separate from ours. So we can know this God
by knowing our own inwardness, our own freedom, truth, and so forth. No special
faculty, no “sensus divinitatis,” and no apparatus of “proofs” are required.8
That we can know God does not bring God down to “our” ordinary level. For
our inwardness or God continue to be higher than much of the world inasmuch
as, in our ongoing “identity crisis,” our freedom, truth, love, and beauty continue
to be higher than much of what we’re composed of.
If we can know God as our own freedom, truth, love, beauty, and (in general)
inwardness, then what people call “faith” turns out to be our loyalty to this
inwardness or this higher reality, in the face of the attractions of lower or more
external desires and projects. Which is a loyalty that can be difficult enough to
maintain, even though we sometimes experience the higher reality as our own
freedom, truth, love, and beauty. For a part of us is often eager to suggest cynically
that there is no real freedom, truth, love, or beauty—that our “higher interests” are
merely fantasies, because nothing is really “higher.” Instincts like fear, anger, and
self-protection and ideologies like materialism and naturalism can promote such
a view very effectively.
“Nihilism” is one of the common names for this view, whose power most of us
have felt.9 It has also been called the “dark night of the soul,” depression, despair,
and so forth. Being driven by instinct, these states of mind are very natural.
One result that they can have, when we’re accustomed to them, is that because a
breakthrough of love and freedom is so different from what we’re used to thinking
that we have inside us, it will often seem to come from “outside” us. The truth is
that the freedom and love that are outside us can only affect us because we have
the potential for them inside us. But the downward forces that we also have within
us can be very persuasive in their denial that there is any such positive potential
there (or anywhere at all).10

14   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

“Mysticism”
The claim that in spite of all of this, we do have freedom and love and thus God and
the ultimate reality within us, and that consequently we can know God directly,
is the characteristic doctrine of “mysticism.” Because this doctrine is often not
explained clearly, “mysticism” has acquired additional connotations, such as that
the mystical knowledge of God “goes beyond reason,” that it’s “other-worldly,” and
that it’s experienced only by a select few, on extraordinary occasions.
But I follow common dictionary definitions of the primary sense of “mysticism”
as simply “immediate consciousness of (or union with) the transcendent or
ultimate reality or God.” So I ask readers to set aside other suggestions that may
be commonly associated with “mysticism” but are not part of what I mean by the
word. In particular, (1) there is no suggestion here that this consciousness or union
goes beyond “reason,” except insofar as people often define “reason” in dogmatic
ways that put unreasonable limits on its method or its realm of application. (2)
Nor is there a claim of a peculiar “faculty” that makes this consciousness or union
possible. No “sensus divinitatis.” (3) Nor is there a suggestion that the mystical
consciousness or unity is “ineffable” (though it may certainly be difficult to
express).
(4) Nor is there a suggestion that mysticism puts us in touch with “another
world”—except in the not particularly controversial sense that it makes us aware
of aspects of our everyday world which are in important ways “higher” and which
aren’t studied by, for example, present-day physics, chemistry, or biology. So
“mysticism” as I understand it is not accurately described as “other-worldly.” What
it makes us conscious of is transcendent or ultimate in the sense that it’s higher, but
not in the sense that it’s separate. (In keeping with my objection to the notion that
God is “separate” from us, I regard the notion of “union with God” as a metaphor
for what is actually the discovery of a way in which we have in fact all along been
God.)
Furthermore, (5) I think it’s a mistake to assume, as writers about mysticism
generally do, that any person who is conscious of God will know that she’s
conscious of God. If mysticism is immediate consciousness of the transcendent
or ultimate reality or God, I suggest that this consciousness is in fact present in
our experience of trying to have an open mind, or inner freedom, or love, or
forgiveness, or other similar states. In a way that I’ll explain in subsequent chapters,
true open-mindedness (or inner freedom, and so forth) is the ultimate reality or
God, so when we’re conscious of our own open-mindedness or our effort to be
open-minded, we’re conscious of God. But it’s easy for a person to be conscious of
open-mindedness, inner freedom, love, or forgiveness, and not realize that, as I’m
going to argue in this book, these are what the ultimate reality or God is composed
of. So in being conscious of them, she’s conscious of the ultimate reality or God
without knowing that this is what she’s conscious of.

“A WORM! A GOD!”    15
 We might call such a person a “mystic,” even though she doesn’t entirely know
what she’s conscious of. Or we might coin a special term for this intermediate
state between unconsciousness of the ultimate reality or God and consciousness
of the ultimate reality or God combined with full knowledge about what the
consciousness is of. However we choose to designate it, this intermediate state
is extremely important, because it means that something that we might call
“mysticism” is much more widespread than we generally recognize. Practically
everyone experiences open-mindedness, inner freedom, love, or forgiveness, at
one time or another. So practically everyone experiences what I will argue is the
ultimate reality or God, though most often without knowing that this is what
they’re experiencing. When we realize this, our attitude toward what we call
“mysticism” may change significantly, because an important kind of “mysticism”
then turns out to be an almost universal human possession.
Thus, (6) contrary to a widespread assumption, practically all of us are “mystics,”
in the sense that practically all of us sometimes are immediately conscious of the
ultimate reality or God, though often without knowing that this is what we’re
conscious of. Individuals like Rumi, Whitman, Plato, or Hegel, on the other hand,
who know what it is that they’re conscious of, and who may be able to evoke this
kind of knowledge for others, are “mystics” in a stronger and more familiar sense
of the word. Both groups show us something very important, and something that’s
generally ignored, about human beings. But this very important thing is not the
extraordinary “mystical experiences” that we hear so much about. Rather, it’s the
transcendence that we experience in many much more familiar ways, in everyday
life, but which we often don’t appreciate as transcendence. I’ll say more about this
issue throughout the book and especially in Chapter 9.
Plato and Hegel explain the direct knowledge of God in a way that makes it
clear that it doesn’t have to have any of these other features that are often associated
with “mysticism.” Part of the purpose of this book is to lay out Plato’s and Hegel’s
explanations so that you can see how mysticism can be perfectly rational and
confirmed by your own experience.11 And, indeed, so that you can see how the
knowledge of God, which mysticism shows that we possess, is the fulfillment that’s
described by traditional religions as salvation or awakening.
I should probably note here that some recent commentators have gone so far as
to maintain that Plato himself wasn’t actually a “mystic,” so that the long tradition
of interpreting him as a mystic is based on a mistake. These commentators describe
“mysticism” as “other-worldly” (Terence Irwin [1989], p. 114; Peter Adamson
[2014], p. 159), and they point out Plato’s evident ongoing interest in the ordinary
world of nature, politics, and so on. There are also commentators who raise similar
objections to describing Hegel as a “mystic.” I think these objections are based on
a misconception of what mysticism is.12 The primary meaning of the term is the
doctrine that we can have direct knowledge of God or the ultimate reality. But if
this God or ultimate reality is “in” the everyday world, as both Plato and Hegel

16   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

suggest, there’s no reason why knowledge of God or the ultimate reality should
reduce the mystic’s interest in the everyday world—though certainly he or she will
see that world in a different light.13

A God who, in one way, we are

Let us return, then, to the knowledge of God that mysticism shows that we
possess, and the consequent salvation or awakening. We possess this knowledge,
salvation, or awakening already, because we already have the freedom, truth, love,
and beauty that we dream of—if only in the form of our ideals. Inasmuch as we
appreciate what freedom, truth, love, and beauty would be, we possess them, to
some degree.14 So the part of us that has this dream, already is what it dreams of.
And since this inspired part of us is free, which means self-determining, it’s
fully itself in a way that our other parts, which are determined by what’s around
them, are not. Indeed, since bounds or limits would involve constraining relations
to what’s around it, and thus prevent it from being fully self-determined, this “part”
must be unbounded, infinite. Through it, then, we are fully ourselves and infinite.
Difficult though it is to believe, we are, through this “part” of us, God right now.
Bearing in mind, of course, that this “God” that we are is the truly transcendent,
free, and loving reality that isn’t a separate being from the world.
If the notion that we are (in any respect) “God” sounds grandiose or insane,
remember that we are this God only by being loving and fully free, which means
precisely not being driven by our separateness from other beings and our self-
importance. So Heinrich Heine misunderstood Hegel when he wrote in a much-
quoted humorous recollection that “I was young and proud, and it gratified my
self-esteem to learn from Hegel that, contrary to what my grandmother thought,
it wasn’t the Lord in heaven, but I myself here on earth who was God.”15 Pride has
to do with one’s relations to others, and thus is a feature of a finite and non-self-
determining being. So to the extent that Heine was proud, he wasn’t God. Whether
Heine failed to understand this or, for the sake of his joke, chose not to understand
it is hard to determine.
So it’s not by accident that when I mention freedom it’s always in tandem
with love and ethics. People who seek inner freedom sooner or later find out that
insisting on our own needs over other people’s needs (or on others’ needs over
our own) prevents us from being fully free, because it means that we’re constantly
determined by something that isn’t us. We’re constantly determined, in these cases,
by the dividing line between us and the others.
This is why we always exhibit a certain compulsiveness or lack of vision, that is,
a lack of freedom, when we’re preoccupied with the separation between ourselves
and others. For whatever reason, we haven’t discovered or we’ve forgotten what
full freedom is like.

“A WORM! A GOD!”    17
 So, as I said, the “part” of us that dreams of freedom, truth, love, and beauty,
and by appreciating them is them, is God by being fully itself and infinite. I put
“part” in scare quotes, here—we are God through this “part” of us—because since
it’s infinite, this “part” can’t really be a mere “part” of anything. It must be the
whole.
But you certainly know why I nevertheless want to call it only a “part” of us:
because we aren’t aware of being God! Ordinarily, we feel like we’re anything but
God. We feel (at best) limited, imperfect, not fully free, not fully ourselves, and
separate from others. So that when Eckhart Tolle asks, “How can you find that
which was never lost, the very life that you are? . . . God-realization is the most
natural thing there is,”16 we may be inclined to reply, If it’s so natural, why hasn’t
“God-realization” happened to us?

Why we often don’t know this

We aren’t usually aware of being God because as human beings we’re anything but
God. Being human carries with it a lot of blindness. But when that blindness is
lifted, we discover to our great surprise that we aren’t only human beings. Insofar
as we care about inner freedom, love, and related ideals, we are inner freedom,
love, and the rest, and thus we’re infinite, and we’re God. This is the sense in which
we really are “one” with each other.
If we are inner freedom and God, and in that sense “one” with each other,
why are we, in other respects, so imperfect, so ignorant of who we are, and so
“separate”? This is because a truly infinite God can’t exclude anything, including
what’s imperfect, “separate,” and ignorant. So there must be imperfect, separate,
and ignorant things such as we are in our capacity as human beings, and such
as rocks and trees are in their capacity as rocks and trees. True infinity includes
every variety of finitude. This is why we must be imperfect, not fully free, not fully
ourselves, and largely blind—as well as, through our dreams and ideals, perfect,
free, fully ourselves, enlightened, and “one.” It’s why we must be the ongoing
identity crisis—“helpless immortal! insect infinite!”—that we are.
Our ongoing identity crisis between finite and infinite, human and divine,
ignorant and knowing is what “humanism” in its various forms overlooks, and what
traditional religions through their various mythologies bring to our attention.17
But within this crisis, clearly our dreams and ideals are the main thing: that we
love and admire and sometimes try to emulate the divine freedom, truth, love, and
beauty. These are always in us, and however dismal our failures are, however much
we fail to realize, our essential divinity outweighs our failures because it’s infinite
and fully itself—that is, divine.
When we appear not to love, but rather to be hateful or indifferent to our
fellow humans, it’s because we’re preoccupied with the effort to defend merely

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“our own” individual freedom (as we call it), or the freedom of “the people we
care about,” against some actual or imagined threat. We haven’t yet discovered or
we’ve forgotten that simply opposing “others,” even by being indifferent to them,
determines us by our relation to these “others” and thus detracts from our self-
determination and freedom rather than adding to them.
The discovery that our freedom is and depends on the freedom of everyone,
often happens when we experience a major loss, a catastrophe, or a trauma. The
experience of being close to death, or to something like it, allows us to see beyond
the limits of our “own,” individual life—to “die,” as the saying goes, “before we die.”
Our horizon expands beyond what we could previously imagine.
When this happens, we realize that to have inner freedom, we have to love
everyone—often by forgiving others, and ourselves as well, for the way we have
trampled on our freedom. This is not to say that we will put up no resistance
to such trampling by ourselves and others. Rather, it means that such resistance
must be offered in ways that are consistent with fundamental love—with being
“one.”
Hatred and indifference turn out, when we understand them in this way, to
be products of an underdeveloped and narrow conception of freedom. They’re
produced by a conception of freedom that doesn’t appreciate either freedom’s
“inner” aspect or how that aspect requires concern for the freedom of others: how
it requires love and ethics.
When we understand this, both intellectually and emotionally, we can see
underdeveloped forms or stages of freedom everywhere. However rudimentary
they may be, however much pain they may cause to others, they are still forms of
freedom, and in that respect they’re beautiful.

Beauty in everything
When we appreciate the beauty, in all of its imperfection, of these forms or stages
of freedom, then our world in which this beauty is everywhere is, in its essence,
all beautiful. Everything in it is trying, to the best of its more or less limited ability,
to be free and thus divine. As Alfred North Whitehead put it, “Every event on its
finer side introduces God into the world.”18 And the finer side is self-determining,
fully itself, and fully real as itself, in a way that the event’s other, as it were, parasitic
side is not.
This is how we can, in William Blake’s pregnant words,

. . . see a world in a grain of sand,

and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of [our] hand
and eternity in an hour.19

“A WORM! A GOD!”    19
When we realize that divine beauty is everywhere because we are, in an important
way, what we dream of and because freedom unfolds in stages and, like all of our
dreams, we easily forget it, we are reconciled with our ongoing troubles—with our
inevitable, ongoing identity crisis. This reconciliation gives us a peace, an “eternity
in an hour,” that can be found nowhere else.
The Platonic tradition doesn’t underestimate the world’s injustice and pain. It’s
clear from the rest of his poetical work that Blake, for example, is anything but a
“Pollyanna.” But he can still project the vision of reconciliation that we see in this
poem. And Plato’s writings examine in detail the miseries that we inflict upon
ourselves and each other. But in doing so they bring out the beauty, the higher
value, which is present in some form in every human effort.
This Platonic reconciliation with our own and the world’s imperfection is
probably the only real antidote for the moral and religious impatience that drives
millenarian and apocalyptic hopes and terrorism. Without dreams of perfect
freedom, we might as well be dead. But without compassion for the necessary
imperfection of our freedom, we can spread death and destruction in the name of
those dreams.20
The only solution to this problem is to appreciate as versions of freedom,
however rudimentary, the behavior that we and the people around us currently do
exhibit. And thus to love ourselves and others as we are at present, and not merely
as we “ought to be.” Simultaneously to regret our imperfection, and to celebrate
the freedom that’s present in that imperfection. Because it’s only by forgiving
imperfection that we can be fully free.21
The reconciling peace, the “eternity in an hour” that follows from the love that
forgives imperfection, is the enlightenment or salvation that’s described by the
mystical stream in each of the world’s major religions.

Philosophy explains
Few people realize, today, that Western philosophy in Plato and his successors
provides a worked-out rational explanation of how we possess this “mystical”
peace, enlightenment, and salvation. Though Plato’s exploration of these issues
in his dialogues is brilliant, it’s also complex, tentative, and sometimes gnomic,
and so is the work of many of those who have learned from him. Hegel gives the
classic modern account of how inner freedom requires forgiveness in the section on
“Conscience” of his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and of how freedom and love are
the highest and fullest reality in his Science of Logic (1812–14) and Encyclopedia of
the Philosophical Sciences (1817–). But because of the complexity and exhaustiveness
of his account, few interpreters have understood what it’s actually about.
Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein are the major twentieth-
century figures who tried, without drawing on Hegel, to explain the connection

20   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

between philosophy and what Wittgenstein called “the mystical.” But because they
didn’t articulate their accounts in terms of familiar human experiences such as
inner freedom, love, and forgiveness, what they were proposing hasn’t been well
understood either.
Michael Polanyi, Iris Murdoch, J. N. Findlay, Sebastian Rödl, and Wolfram
Gobsch provide the best recent accounts of these matters. I’ll discuss most of these
writers from Whitehead to Rödl in Chapter 2.22

A modern problem: Science

A major reason for our recent difficulties is how impressed we have been, since
the nineteenth century, by ideologies that claim to speak with the authority of the
natural sciences. There is a vocal party that regularly asserts that only science and
technology can really be “rational.” In which case, there is no real freedom apart
from science and technology, and thus no enlightenment, awakening, or salvation
as those are traditionally understood. Such a view shuts the discussion down very
quickly.
Philosophical mysticism can respond to these assertions in three ways.
First, by pointing out that the claim that only science and technology are really
rational can’t itself be grounded solely on science and technology, without
being circular and merely assuming what it claims to prove. So if someone
who makes this claim wants to avoid assuming what he claims to prove, he is
already, in effect, engaging in a rational discussion that isn’t entirely scientific
or technological.
Secondly, philosophical mysticism can point out how inner freedom, love, and
beauty in fact strive for and embody something that deserves to be called “reason.”
Inner freedom is distinguished from mere randomness by its effort to have good
reasons for what it does. Love, which celebrates what it loves as admirable, is
willing, in the right circumstances, to give reasons why others should admire it
too. Beauty, likewise, has its reasons, which taste and critics are aware of and try
to articulate.23
Though these reasons generally aren’t scientific, they all deserve to be called
reasons because our processing of them is responsive to information and to open-
minded discussion, and thus it reflects a kind of thought (which needn’t always
be articulated or conscious). If this processing wasn’t responsive to information
and discussion, it wouldn’t be free and its celebration wouldn’t be genuine. But we
know from our experience that it often is genuine.
I’ll explore the role of reason in inner freedom, love, and beauty in Chapters 3
and 5 through 7. Through this role of reason in them, the mysticism that celebrates
the reality that’s composed of inner freedom, love, and beauty celebrates something
that in fact is composed of reason, throughout.

“A WORM! A GOD!”    21
Science as a part of God
But it’s not just that science and technology have no monopoly on rationality. The
third point that needs to be made, and which I made already in the Introduction,
is that insofar as science pursues truth as such, and not merely what might turn out
to be “useful,” science is itself a form of inner freedom, and thus it’s a part of the
higher reality of freedom, truth, love, and beauty which philosophical mysticism
celebrates.
If the amazing physical powers that the sciences have given us in the course
of the last two centuries serve merely to give us what we already unreflectively
want, they aren’t godlike. For then they leave us in the same inner unfreedom
that we were already in; and there’s no transcendence in that. Our current great
uncertainty about our future on this planet, in view of the cumulative effects of our
newly achieved physical powers, testifies to the very un-godlike nature of a great
part of what we are.
If, on the other hand, our engagement in science is a pursuit of truth as such,
as it seems to be for great scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, then it
takes us beyond our existing wants, opinions, and self-importance, and in this
way it liberates us and makes us truly godlike.24 When we pursue the sciences in
this way, they take their place alongside religion, philosophy, ethics, and the arts
as taking us beyond our “all too human” qualities. Thus opening up the possibility
of something that’s more rational, more self-determining, and more “itself,” which
therefore deserves to be called “a higher reality.” Of which all of these cultural and
personal efforts, including the sciences, are aspects.
I don’t mean to suggest that these “cultural efforts” are incompatible with
“nature.” As we see in our ongoing “identity crisis,” the sciences, religion,
philosophy, ethics, and the arts, which go beyond mere mechanistic self-
preservation, are nevertheless carried out by creatures who in other respects
are very much products of nature. So we can certainly explore how it is that our
species and perhaps others have come to be able to pursue truth, self-determining
freedom, love, and beauty in various ways for their own sakes, and thus to rise
above mechanistic self-preservation as we sometimes do. It’s just that we mustn’t
assume that the ultimate explanation of this going-beyond or rising-above will be
in terms of mechanistic self-preservation! For that would defeat the whole effort.
The upshot is that we shouldn’t suppose, as we often do, that science shows or
assumes that there is no higher reality. Together with religion, philosophy, ethics,
and the arts, science is an essential part of the only truly higher and inspiring
reality: the reality that’s composed of and guided by truth and thought, of various
kinds, rather than by genes, hormones, appetites, opinions, self-importance, and
so forth.
Science contributes to our understanding of this higher reality, insofar as
it elucidates the mechanisms (the genes, hormones, neurons, opinions, self-

22   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

importance, and so forth) that make the higher reality possible. But as Socrates
points out in Plato’s Phaedo (98d-99c), to show what makes human thought or
action possible is not to provide a complete explanation of it. The phenomenon
of science itself demonstrates this, insofar as science seeks something that no
mechanism as such seeks, namely, truth as such.
When we see how science and religion both contribute to the existence of this
higher reality, by rising above the directives of genes, hormones, self-importance,
and so forth, then we see that the ongoing controversies between advocates of
science and advocates of religion are an unnecessary distraction. What’s really
needed is a recognition, on each side, that neither of them is the whole story,
and that dogmatism on either side prevents it from playing its proper role in the
pursuit of truth (and of the freedom, love, and beauty that seek to be guided by
truth). By deciding in advance what particular method or belief will lead to truth,
dogmatism prevents us from being truly truth-guided or free.

Reconciliation of “object” and “subject,”

fact and value, and you and me
Besides uniting us with God, in the way that I’ve been describing, the Plato/Hegel
higher unity and higher reality also unites us with ourselves, with nature, and with
each other. Insofar as we view ourselves, nature, and each other as “objects,” as we
do in science and in our instrumental dealings with the world, we are separate
from our bodies, nature, and each other. This is true regardless of how often we
may call ourselves a “part of nature”; for we are still in fact claiming the rational
authority to make this judgment, and that claim to rational authority sets us
apart from what the judgment claims to be the case. This is the hidden dualism
in philosophical “naturalism.” And all of this separateness, from our bodies, from
nature, and from each other, may well seem to deprive our world of the beauty and
the inherent value that it may have had in our childhood and in earlier epochs of
human history.
But when we see that rather than being merely negative, or “disenchanting,”
as Max Weber put it, this objectification is a part of our positive effort to be fully
ourselves by being guided by truth rather than by genes, hormones, self-importance,
and the like, then beauty, value, and enchantment return. For now we can see the
“objective” world, including our own bodies, as embodying, everywhere, efforts to
achieve selfhood and freedom. We human beings, we objects in the natural world,
are making these efforts that go beyond bodily mechanisms, self-importance, and
the like. And nature as a whole is doing the same thing, through us and (in varying
degrees and varying ways) through everything.
And insofar as the “objective” world is pervaded by these efforts that point
beyond mere “objectivity,” beyond bodily mechanisms, self-importance, and the

“A WORM! A GOD!”    23
like, it is thereby as beautiful and valuable as anything could be. “Object” and
“subject,” the “external world” and the knower, body and mind, fact and value,
mechanism and freedom are reconciled—not by reducing either member to the
other one, which would be no reconciliation, but by understanding how one is the
other going beyond itself. “The good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis.”
And by this process, you and I are also reconciled, inasmuch as we aren’t merely
“objects” to each other or to ourselves, but rather through our shared effort to go
beyond the separateness and consequent unfreedom of that “object”-hood, we are
a “we.” We, as the “good life,” are “the world seen sub specie aeternitatis.”

“Idealism”
Because the single, self-determining, free higher reality that we’re talking about is
made possible by ideas or thought of some kind, the Plato/Hegel doctrine of the
higher reality is often called “idealism.” But it’s important to note that this kind
of “idealism” does not assert, like George Berkeley, that things in general exist by
being “ideas” in a human mind or in God’s mind. Nor does it assert, like Immanuel
Kant, that the objects of knowledge are given some of their key features by the
minds that know them. That is, the Plato/Hegel “idealism” differs in principle
from the kinds of “idealism” that are usually taken, in recent discussions, as the
prototypes of all “idealism.”25
Berkeley and Kant presuppose (in Berkeley’s case, by denying) a contrast
between external and internal, object and subject. The “anti-idealist” “realisms”
that appear periodically since their time presuppose the same contrast.26 But
Plato and Hegel go beyond this contrast, without denying it, when they show how
although “objects” that are independent of “subjects” certainly exist, the “subject”
as such is more fully real (because it’s self-determining) than any mere “object”
could be. This notion of a higher degree of reality is what Plato’s and Hegel’s
“idealism” is about.
There is, in fact, good reason to regard the Platonic kind of idealism, rather than
Berkeley’s or Kant’s, as the original prototype of “idealism.” It was after all Plato
who put “ideai” (“Forms,” or “Ideas”) at the center of the discussion of “reality,”
two millennia before Berkeley and Kant, and it’s likely that their more recent
“idealisms” were encouraged, at some level, by inklings of what Plato himself was
driving at. Though by not conceiving of a scale of greater and lesser degrees of
reality, and instead formulating their “idealisms” in merely contrastive, dualistic
ways, they created ongoing confusion that Plato and Hegel avoid.
I discuss the varieties of “idealism” in a bit more detail in Chapter 2. To avoid
unnecessary confusion, in most of the book I avoid using the term. But for those
who are familiar with the modern debates between versions of “idealism” and
versions of “realism,” it’s very helpful to see how these debates are motivated by
a real issue, which however the participants don’t fully understand. When we

24   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

understand how what’s self-determining has a higher degree of reality, reality
as itself, which is entirely compatible with the reality (in the ordinary sense of
“existence”) of what’s not self-determining, we can understand the modern debates
without being drawn into them, in their own terms.

Cultural reconciliation
So the fuller reality that’s achieved by subject-hood and self-determination is the
core of truth that Plato and other philosophical mystics identify in traditional
theism as well as in our experience of ethics, mind, knowledge, science, the arts,
and freedom. This core is divine in that it transcends everyday reactive mechanical
functioning by being self-determining, free, loving, and beautiful. But this
transcendence takes place not through a dualistic contrast, which would itself be
reactive and unfree, but rather as a self-transcendence, in which what exists but
is not self-determining and in that sense is not fully real sometimes “ascends” to
self-determination and thus full reality.
In their collective contribution to this true (because nondualistic) transcendence,
nondogmatic science, nondogmatic religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy
are equal partners. For in their various ways they all rise above merely reactive
mechanism and help to constitute a reality that deserves to be called “higher.”
The resulting differentiated unity of science, religion, ethics, the arts, and
philosophy was articulated in Plato’s accounts of “ascent” (in the Republic,
Symposium, and so forth), in which science, mathematics, ethics, beauty, and a
philosophical religion overlap. We’ll explore these accounts in Chapters 5–8.
Aristotle articulated a similar unity in his biology, psychology, ethics, politics,
poetics, and metaphysical theology, and Hegel articulated another in his account
of “Spirit” as rational freedom taking the forms of (among other things) sense
perception, intellect, ethics, politics, art, religion, and philosophy.27
Emerson wrote that “in the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout
and devotion is thought,” and “it is the office of this age . . . to annul that adulterous
divorce which the superstition of many ages has effected between the intellect and
holiness,” which is to say, between philosophy or science and religion.28 Robin
George Collingwood proposed “to build up the conception of an activity which
is at once art, and religion, and science, and the rest.”29 Whitehead wrote that
“philosophy . . . attains its chief importance by fusing . . . religion and science into
one rational scheme of thought.”30 And Jonathan Lear recently suggested that we
consider “the possibility that science and religion might be, not just compatible,
but of a piece. . . . Science is, after all, an act of unification, a development of a
higher complexity, an act of love.”31
It can’t be said that ideas like these are currently widely understood or shared.
My goal is to state as clearly as possible what this tradition of thought has been up

“A WORM! A GOD!”    25
to, so as to encourage us to appreciate it and develop it further. How remarkable it
would be if the watchwords of the contending sides of our culture—truth, reason,
freedom, love, beauty, transcendence, and divinity—all pointed ultimately to the
same thing. We could then be less divided, one-sided, or unsure than many of us
have been for several centuries now.

An overview of this book

I begin Chapter 2 with a general account of our unifying goal and the single reality
or “God within us” that it constitutes, taking passages from Emerson as my point
of departure and using an analysis that comes mainly from Hegel. (All of this in
ordinary English—no technical jargon!) As I said in the Introduction, in Chapter
2 you will get details about writers from Emerson to Rödl, in Chapters 2–4 you
will hear quite a lot about Hegel, and in Chapters 5–8 you will hear even more
about Plato.
My interpretation of Emerson as a Platonist may be unfamiliar but it’s not
unusual in recent scholarship. And though I lay more stress on Whitehead’s and
Wittgenstein’s Platonism than one sometimes sees, my interpretations of them are
not so unorthodox as to be incompatible with common interpretations.
My interpretation of Hegel, on the other hand, differs from the nearly universal
consensus of recent commentaries in that I take Hegel not to be rejecting the
notion of a “transcendent” God but to be giving a more coherent conception of
such a God than everyday discourse does. Hegel is providing a conception of a God
who is truly transcendent: a “true infinity,” as Hegel puts it, which is not rendered
finite or (consequently) immanent by being a separate being alongside such other
separate beings as ourselves and the world. My book about Hegel (2005) gives a
detailed defense of this interpretation of his work.32 In this book, I discuss only a
few of Hegel’s key texts in detail, mainly presenting in my own words what I take
to be his sound argument for replacing common conceptions of “transcendence”
with a more defensible conception.
One result of my way of reading Hegel is that his philosophical theology turns
out, in fact, to be in line with much traditional thinking about God, including St
Paul (in God we “live and move and have our being”) and the many early Christian
writers and saints who say that we can in some way “become God.”33 Hegel makes
sense of these traditional teachings, which everyday talk about God doesn’t try to
make sense of.
And this perhaps unexpected continuity between Hegel and Christian teachings
has the effect that the common contrast between “modern,” supposedly “secular”
and non-“transcendent” philosophy and the previous, ancient and Christian
epochs needs to be rethought. Major thinkers in all epochs in the West (in recent
times, think of Wittgenstein and Whitehead, as well as Hegel) have been drawn

26   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

to a metaphysics that isn’t easily categorized as “secular,” while skeptics in all ages
have criticized such notions, and there is no reason to expect this dialectic to cease
or to be radically transformed, while the makings of these views continue to be
present.
So I try to contribute to an understanding of this dialogue across the millennia
with my four chapters on Plato. These chapters explore central passages from
some of Plato’s most important dialogues (especially the Republic, Symposium,
Phaedrus, and Timaeus) to show how he criticizes empiricism, materialism, and
scientism and how he develops an understanding of God or the ultimate reality
as freedom, truth, love, and beauty. This is an understanding that differs from
everyday talk about God or gods in much the same way that St Paul, the other
early Christian writers, and philosophical theists from Hegel to Murdoch differ
from it.
Along the way, my discussion of Plato clarifies a series of long-standing issues
that people raise in regard to his thought and that commentators haven’t fully
resolved. First, pointing out that books iv-vii of Plato’s Republic present what is
in fact an illuminating analysis of inner freedom or self-government, I explain
how inner freedom together with value or the “Good” enables some things to be,
as Plato puts it, “more real” than others. Contrary to a common interpretation
which some of his wording encourages, Plato is neither, on the whole, denigrating
bodies nor celebrating the soul as something that’s inherently separate from its
body. Rather, he is drawing attention to the way in which the body goes beyond
itself through thinking and soul by being more truth-directed and thus more self-
governing than bodies are when they’re functioning merely as bodies. (Details on
this in Chapters 5–7.) Being more self-governing, what goes beyond bodies in this
way is more real as “itself.”
Although this notion of a higher degree of reality is fundamental for resolving
the major issues that I’ve been talking about, it hasn’t been explained by recent
scholarship, but instead it has been treated as though it were some kind of Platonic
dogma. I show how it’s well justified.
I go on in Chapter 7 to show how Plato shows that reason is essential to eros
or love, and thus how and why the lover “must become a lover of all beautiful
bodies” and souls, as Diotoma says at Symposium 210b. This connection between
reason and eros shows how reason and emotion can be allies rather than being,
as we often assume, at odds with each other. And this in turn makes possible the
rational/emotional ecstasy that Plato describes in some of his most famous and
today apparently least understood passages.34
Then I show how, although eros must extend to “all beautiful bodies” and souls,
it loves individual people, as individuals. How this could be the case has been a
vexed question since Gregory Vlastos drew attention to the issue half a century
ago, and Martha Nussbaum more recently. It’s crucial for seeing how Plato’s
“ascent” operates within the world, and not merely by escaping it.

“A WORM! A GOD!”    27
 Next, in Chapter 8, I reconstruct Plato’s justification for his assertion in the
Timaeus that the divine can’t be “jealous” or spiteful, and I show how this doctrine
implies that a fully rational/erotic and thus “godlike” person will engage with the
world (“go down”) and be guided by justice in her dealings with others. This is
Plato’s answer to the question, “Why be moral?” And finally I show how Plato’s
mystical theology emerges from and completes this account of human/divine
rational/erotic functioning, so that his mysticism is indeed fully rational. This is
the synthesis of freedom, love, and God by which so many Western thinkers and
poets have been inspired.
Illuminating these texts and issues, the book can serve as an introduction to
many of the central themes of the philosophy for which it’s appropriate to give
Plato credit. It can also serve as an introduction to the broad tradition that has
been fed by this philosophy. Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Dante Alighieri,
Immanuel Kant, Hegel, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Whitehead,
Wittgenstein—we can’t understand the vertical dimension of reality which all of
these authors and many others celebrate, without understanding Plato’s notion of
“ascent” to a higher reality.35
Introducing this tradition, the book introduces the main alternative that
Western thought has produced to the doctrines of empiricism, materialism,
scientism, existentialism, and postmodernism. These doctrines have attracted
much attention during the last couple of centuries, but they don’t clarify the central
issues that Platonism and the present book address, namely, the relations between
religion and science, value and fact, ethics and rationality, emotion and intellect,
mind and body, and the knower and the “external world.”

28   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

2 “THAT WHICH SHOWS
GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES
ME”

That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me

by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in me,
fortifies me.
EMERSON, “DIVINITY COLLEGE ADDRESS”

We live in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul

of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and
particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which
we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is . . . self-sufficing and
perfect in every hour.
EMERSON, “THE OVER-SOUL”

Inner freedom and being oneself

To consider Emerson’s teaching in the above quotations, let us begin with his
“great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.”1 To follow this doctrine’s advice is not as easy
as it may sound. Anger, fear, social expectations, self-importance, and self-doubt
are among the obstacles that stand in the way of our being fully self-governing and
fully ourselves.
Much of the history of literature, philosophy, and psychology is an exploration
of these issues. In literature and mythology, the “hero’s journey” is her search,
so that she can “obey” her true self, for who she really is, as opposed to what the
external world has made her. Think of Odysseus, Telemachus, Orestes, Oedipus,
Psyche in Apuleius’s Golden Ass, the Israelites’ forty years in the desert, Jesus’s
testing by Satan, and the Buddha’s testing by Mara. Think of Dante’s Divine
Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, George Herbert’s self-depiction, Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and
Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and
Back Again, and Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
Psychological analyses of the hero myth have been given by Joseph Campbell
(1949) and Erich Neumann (1954 and 1956). Behind Campbell and Neumann
stand Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, who analyze the goal of obeying one’s
true self under the headings of the “ego” (“where id was, there ego shall be”) and
“individuation” and the “Self.” In modern philosophy, obeying one’s true self is the
theme of the “autonomy,” “freedom,” “self-reliance,” or “authenticity” that Kant,
Hegel, Emerson, and other modern thinkers hold up as a central ideal. In ancient
philosophy, it’s the theme of Stoicism (to which Emerson alludes) and of some of
Plato’s most important dialogues.
When Plato lays out the three “parts of the soul,” in Republic book iv, he makes
it clear that someone who is governed by his appetites or his emotions, rather than
by his “rational part,” isn’t fully in charge of his own life. Rather than operating
as “entirely one” (443d), such a person is handing his life over to a mere part of
himself. We can apply this analysis to many of the men whom Plato describes
in the dialogues, such as Alcibiades who says that “his own soul” objects to the
way he “caves in to his desire to please the crowd” (Symposium 215e-216b), or
Thrasymachus in Republic book i, of whom we might wonder whether he has any
effective self at all that’s distinct from his pride and anger.
Plato goes on to describe in Republic books vi and vii how the soul’s rational
part can function by seeking knowledge of what’s truly good, as opposed to what
feels good or is said to be good—all of which is likely to have come originally from
outside one. So the famous “ascent” from the Cave, which pursues this knowledge
of what’s truly good, is in fact an aspect of the effort to “obey thyself,” as opposed
to heteronomy or obeying what is not thyself. In this way, Plato is in fact the first
philosopher/psychologist to analyze this issue that continues to be central, after
him, in both ancient and modern thought and literature.
And of course this effort to “obey thyself ” is identical to the “identity crisis”
struggle that I discussed in the previous chapter. Will I be what my ingrained
appetites, opinions, and self-importance dictate, or will I be something higher and
more “myself ” than that?

Being oneself, and God

But Emerson, like Plato and others, suggests that becoming fully oneself is
fundamental not only for philosophy and psychology but for true religion as well.

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He says in our quotation that when I “obey myself,” I’m obeying “God in me.” Does
this make any sense?
According to what’s probably the most common way of reading the Bible, God
and I are separate beings, so that if I obey God, I’m certainly not obeying myself. If
God tells me what to do, and perhaps takes care of me in the manner of a parent,
it seems that God can hardly be “in me.”
However, I’m inclined to think that Emerson’s account of God makes more sense
than this God of the conventionally interpreted Bible. And in fact it turns out, as I
mentioned in the previous chapter, that many early and recent Christian thinkers
seem to have been more in tune with Emerson than with “conventional” thinking
on this subject. Saint Paul is said to have endorsed the idea that “in [God] we live
and move and have our being,” and Saint Athanasius and (to this day) the Roman
Catholic Mass speak of the possibility of our “becoming God.”2 So the God that
these authorities are talking about doesn’t seem to be a simply “separate being,” in
the usual sense of those words. By focusing on our “having our being in” God and
our “becoming” God, Emerson and these evidently quite “orthodox” writers seem
to me to have identified the indispensable kernel of truth in the notion of God.
I don’t think you’ll be surprised when I call an increase in inner freedom an
experience that takes us “higher.” As Emerson says, “The sublime is excited in [us]
by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.” The “sublime” is what’s higher. When
we don’t “obey ourselves,” but instead let ourselves be governed by whatever we’ve
been “wired for” by our past experiences, we lack this higher dimension.
And when we feel the possibility, in our lives, of going “higher” by being more
self-governing, we feel what is, in fact, the kernel of truth in the idea of “God.” This
kernel of truth isn’t that something outside us can be higher than us, it’s that we
ourselves can be higher. “God” is something that we can, to some degree, become.
Since the potential for “rising” toward this higher thing, this ideal, is within us,
we can say, as Emerson and others do, that this God is “within us”—that, as Rumi
says, we “don’t need to go outside” in order to find this God.3
As I explained in the previous chapter, the idea of “becoming God” isn’t
a symptom of grandiosity or hubris if the only way to become God is through
inner freedom and love, that is, through freedom from self-importance. Self-
government, as Plato, Hegel, and Emerson understand it, is anything but self-
centered. One “becomes God” only by seeing God in everything.
An innocent response to the idea of “becoming God” might be that if we were
created by God, we’re inherently lower than God, and that’s the end of the matter.
The notion of “becoming” one’s Creator makes no sense.
But in that case I would have to ask, what makes this God “higher” than what
it creates? What gives it authority and makes it worthy of worship—that is, not
worthy of mere submission but of reverent love and devotion? To be worthy of
worship in that sense, God must transcend us, must belong to a different level of
being.

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    31

The conventional “God” doesn’t transcend
But as I pointed out in the previous chapter, something that’s supposed to belong
to a different level of being had better not be “separate” from other, “lower” things.
It had better not be separate from lower things because something that’s separate
is bounded by what it’s separate from and in that way it belongs to the same level of
being as what it’s separate from.
As Karl Rahner put it in the line that I quoted, a God who is separate from us
and from nature would be “a member of the larger household of all reality” which
is composed of us and nature and this God.4 But a God who is another “member”
(however powerful) alongside the rest of us, existing in the same way that we do,
doesn’t transcend us.
To deserve our worship, God must transcend us, must belong to a different
level of being from us. But no matter how powerful it may be, a God who is a
separate being and thus a “member of a larger household” along with us belongs
to the same level of being that we do.

True transcendence
How, then, can anything really transcend something else? The only way for God
to really transcend us is for God to be our own transcendence of ourselves: the
inner freedom, love, and beauty by which we go beyond our merely mechanical
reactiveness.
A God that’s “within us” in this way doesn’t encounter the problem of being a
mere “member” alongside what’s separate from it. Being everything’s full freedom
or self-government, it clearly isn’t separate from or alongside anything.
But neither is such a God, as you might think at first glance, “immanent in” the
world. It isn’t immanent because it does go beyond—that is, it does transcend—the
aspects of the world that aren’t free. This is the true transcendence that makes
worship appropriate.
The true transcendence that I’ve just outlined was articulated especially clearly
by Hegel. I’ll lay out Hegel’s conception of God, which he derives primarily from
the Platonic tradition, in more detail in the next two chapters. Hegel’s critique
of the conception of God as a separate being has led a large majority of recent
commentators to make the mistake of supposing that he rejects “transcendence”
in favor of “immanence,” and that he thus breaks with the orthodox Christian
tradition.5 But since the God within us, which Hegel calls the “absolute Idea” or
“absolute Spirit,” transcends us insofar as we’re unfree, this God in fact transcends
the world. As Hegel puts it, this God goes beyond everything finite. Whereas the
“God” who’s supposed to be a separate being would not truly transcend (would
not truly go beyond, or be “infinite,” as Hegel puts it), because being separate it’s

32   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

limited by and thus determined by its relation to the beings that it’s separate from.
Being limited and determined by its relation to these other beings, such a God can’t
be fully free and self-governing, and in that way it fails to transcend the world.6
So someone who wants God to be truly transcendent, truly “higher than” the
world, by being fully self-governing, had better not think of God as a separate
being from the world. And as I’ve pointed out, a central and indisputably orthodox
strand of Christian writing (St Paul, St Athanasius, St Augustine, Karl Rahner, Paul
Tillich, and numerous others) does more or less explicitly avoid thinking of God
as a separate being. It seems that writers who talk about a “transcendent being” as
one that’s separate from or “outside” the world haven’t thought hard enough about
what real transcendence would involve.

Loving creator and source of bliss

Furthermore, being separate from nothing, but in everything (as its freedom),
the God within us by its very nature loves everything, nurturing and emerging as
the greatest freedom or self-government of which each thing is capable. This God
“fortifies” us, as Emerson puts it.
Indeed, the God that is our freedom does something similar to creating the
world. The God that is our freedom is completely free, as the conventional Creator
is supposed to be, and it gives the world all the full reality that the world has.
Something that governs itself is “itself,” and is real as itself, to a greater degree than
something that’s simply the product of its surroundings. And one can call what’s
real as itself more fully real than what’s merely the product of its surroundings. In
this sense, the God that is our freedom “creates” the world by giving it its fullest
reality.
And finally, this God’s “beatitude” or blessedness is, as Emerson says, “all
accessible to us,” and it amounts to what’s traditionally called our “salvation.” It’s
accessible to us because this God isn’t separate from us, and so far as we are this
God, we aren’t separate from each other. So through this God we can be united
with everything—near, far, past, present, future—that we love. It’s “perfect in every
hour,” as Emerson says, because separateness applies only to finite things, which
aren’t free in the way that the God within us is.

Is this a “personal” God?

Is the God whom we can “become,” or the “God within us,” what people call a
“personal God”? The Plato/Hegel/Emerson God isn’t “personal” in the sense of
being a separate and thus finite being, whom we might meet in the way that we
meet each other. Nor does their God “intervene” in the world from outside it,

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    33

through “miracles.” Being “outside” the world, once again, would make God finite.
Nor does their God grant finite “favors” that we might ask for. That, too, would
make God finite.
However, the Plato/Hegel/Emerson God is anything but “impersonal” in
the sense of disengaged, or unavailable, or indifferent to us. One could say that
this God is more personal than we are, inasmuch as it’s more free than we often
are. And as our own innermost and truest self, the Plato/Hegel/Emerson God
is more intimately involved with us than anything else could be; it’s always and
everywhere available to us, through its freedom and unlimited love; and it gives
us, when we turn to it, the greatest conceivable fulfillment, wholeness, salvation,
and enlightenment.7
In comparison to all of this, face to face meetings and finite favors that we
might imagine pale into insignificance. When we have appreciated these things
we’ll recognize that traditional religions contain a core of truth—that the ultimate
reality enables us to be both fully ourselves and united with everything that we
care about—which can’t reasonably be dismissed as superstition.
While critics of religion need to appreciate this core of truth in religion,
believers in God need to make a comparable move from their side. Believers need
to understand that in order to really deserve worship and gratitude, by being fully
free, our God must be composed of our own inner freedom, our own pursuit of
truth, and our own love. Higher than us these certainly are, but in us they must
also be, in order to be fully free and genuinely higher. When we understand this,
we’ll see that rather than potentially being in conflict, the God that we worship and
our own freedom, love, and pursuit of truth are the same thing.

Poets and teachers

In the remainder of this chapter, I’d like to survey some of the great poets and
teachers who have helped us to understand this higher reality or God within us.
Touching briefly on Plato and Hegel, whom I’ll discuss in detail in later chapters, I’ll
go into more detail here on other recent teachers including Emerson, Whitehead,
Wittgenstein, J. N. Findlay, Iris Murdoch, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and
Sebastian Rödl.
Book 24 of Homer’s Iliad tells the remarkable story of Achilles’s meeting with
Priam, in which the otherwise “wrathful” Achilles discovers sympathy for an old
man who makes him think of his own father. Rather than being about Achilles’s
wrath, as such, is the Iliad really about this unique exception to that wrath? Does
Homer expect the discerning reader to wonder at this exception, and consider
what it might tell us about what even the most “brutal” humans have within them?
In the fourth century BCE, some centuries after Homer, the young Plato was
apparently so angry at the people of Athens for condemning to death his beloved

34   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

teacher, Socrates, that he was tempted to condemn human life, root and branch.
I infer Plato’s anger from the intemperate language that he sometimes uses about
the world, as when he has Socrates say in the Phaedo that the true philosopher
“despises” food, drink, sex, and bodily ornaments (64d). I’ll discuss this aspect of
Plato in Chapter 5.
But Plato also found a more forgiving and therefore freer approach to life.
This approach centers on the idea of reason as inner freedom and love. God or
the true Good, Plato says, is the goal, the pole star of this reason, freedom, and
love.8 Trying to think seriously about what the true Good would be, and to pursue
it, makes us whole (we would say, “free”) in a way that our appetites and self-
importance (thumos) can’t, because it gives proper attention to the appetites and
self-importance without putting them in charge.
This ascent to greater freedom corresponds to what we call “transcendence.”
Plato describes it in his famous allegory of the man who has spent his life shackled
in a cave, studying the shadows on its wall, and is finally able to leave the cave
and see physical objects and the sun. The shadows on the cave walls represent our
unthinking urges and opinions, while the physical objects and the sun are what
we arrive at by thinking about what’s truly Good. Plato’s constant example of this
liberating transcendence is Socrates.
By way of contrast to Socrates, Plato gives vivid descriptions of the unfreedom
of other Athenians, such as Euthyphro and Alcibiades. Rather than aiming at the
Good, Euthyphro aims at “what the gods want,” and Alcibiades aims at personal
power and pleasure. But Euthyphro is enslaved to his inflated self-importance
as someone who thinks he has special knowledge of the gods, and Alcibiades is
enslaved to the mob of voters whom he seeks to be admired by and thus to lead.
Whereas Socrates, as Plato depicts him, doesn’t seek to be admired or to
experience pride or power or pleasure, but only seeks whatever he thinks is truly
good. So he’s guided by his own thinking, which is his own if anything is. So we
see how pursuing what’s truly good enables a person to be guided by himself, and
thus free. This is the way, in Emerson’s phrase, to “obey thyself.”
And because separateness, for humans as much as for God, governs a person
by his relations to others and thus prevents him from being fully self-governed,
Socrates goes beyond separateness. He treats everyone as he treats himself, that
is, he treats everyone with love. This is why he shows no resentment toward the
people who have condemned him to death.
By combining inner freedom and love in this way, Socrates inspires Plato to
explore in his Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Timaeus how inner freedom
and love are ultimately inseparable. Much as Homer had explored this connection
earlier, in evoking the momentary liberation from self-centeredness which Achilles
found in his compassion for Priam.
After the time of Homer and before Plato, Siddhartha Gautama in India had
made a similarly dramatic discovery of the inseparability of inner freedom and

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    35

love. Sitting under the Bo tree, Siddhartha discovered that he was, as he put it later,
“a light unto himself.” That is, he wasn’t merely the product of the environment
that had generated his desires and thoughts. In an important way, he went beyond
these—not by rejecting them, however, but through compassion. For the Buddha
as for Socrates and Plato, love (in the form of compassion and “rightness”) flowed
from and secured his inner freedom.

Jesus and after

In Palestine some centuries later, when Jesus said that “the last shall be first,” and
so forth, he criticized conventional values in much the same way that Socrates,
Plato, and the Buddha had criticized them. “For what shall it profit a man, if he
shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)
The overriding value is inner. This is articulated in Jesus’s teachings that we
must love our enemies and that the kingdom of God is within us.9 We must
love our enemies because rejection and separateness prevent us from being self-
governing. Whereas if we love everyone, we share inner freedom, the “kingdom of
God,” with everyone.
Throughout this period, people in the Mediterranean basin continued to study
Plato’s teachings. Plotinus, a student of these teachings who taught at Rome in the
third century CE, wrote of the “highest” as “present at many points . . . within our
nature is such a center,” because the Good enables us to be free and ourselves.10
There has been a tendency among recent scholars to distinguish Plotinus and
his successors from Plato himself, calling the former group “Neoplatonists.” (They
themselves called themselves simply “Platonists.”) In terms of the issues on which
I’m focusing in this book, and which I’ll explore in Plato’s writings in Chapters 5
through 8, the continuity between Plato and later Platonists, including Plotinus,
Emerson, Hegel, and Whitehead, stands out.11
The North African Christian Saint Augustine followed the Platonists when
he wrote in his Confessions in the fourth century CE that God was “more inward
than his most inward part.”12 That is, God was more inward to everything than
everything itself was, and more inward to Augustine, in particular, than Augustine
himself was. Thus Augustine combined Plato’s and Plotinus’s notion that the Good
is the key to inwardness or freedom with Jesus’s teaching that the kingdom of God
is “within us.”

Medieval and modern

Christian mystics followed St Augustine and Plotinus in associating God with
inwardness, and so did Islamic mystics like Jelaluddin Rumi. In his grief over the

36   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

disappearance of his teacher and friend Shams of Tabriz, Rumi found the non-
separation from God and from others that fills his poems.
Of course most conventional thinking, not understanding that a God who’s
outside us can’t be fully self-governing and free, has always thought of God as
outside us and outside the world. When Benedict Spinoza, in the Netherlands
in the seventeenth century, proposed that God was “nature” and thus was not a
separate, external being, people thought he was suggesting that “everything” was
God—the doctrine that’s called “pantheism.” Because this seemed to imply that
God wasn’t “higher” than anything, they could hardly accept it, and they roundly
condemned Spinoza.
Spinoza’s critics and his successors in the eighteenth-century “Enlightenment”
in Europe, Voltaire, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant,
didn’t see that a God whom we experience as our own freedom would still be
higher than us insofar as we aren’t consistently free.13 Instead they imagined “God”
in the common way as a being that’s separate from the world, again overlooking
the problem that a being that’s separate can’t be fully self-governing and free.
Kant’s attitude to Platonic theology was more complex than Voltaire’s, Hume’s,
or Rousseau’s.14 Kant does regularly speak un-Platonically of God as “a highest
being,” and he does dismiss “enthusiasm” and “mysticism” as having no rational
content. On the other hand, he focuses just like Plato on the role of reason in
humans’ ascent to self-government; and he speaks systematically and quite
Platonically of the divine as the “ideal” (CPuR A567ff.). The problem is that under
the influence of his Newtonian conception of the knowledge of nature, Kant
gives the divine “ideal” only a “regulative,” not a theoretical validity. He “denies
knowledge in order to make room for faith” (CPuR Bxxx). This dualistic contrast
between knowledge and “faith” generates the futile oscillation, with which we have
become so familiar since Kant’s time, between “theory” and “practice,” “science”
and “religion,” “intellect” and “feeling,” and “fact” and “value.”
To avoid these debilitating dualisms, we need to explore the indivisible unity
of theory and practice, science and religion, intellect and eros, and fact and
value that we see in Plato’s and Hegel’s conceptions of rational ascent (which I
will expound in more detail in the chapters that follow). Rather than being the
opposite of knowledge, “faith” is our loyalty to the higher values whose pursuit we
know constitutes a higher and truer reality, but to which we nevertheless often fail
to be faithful.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) grew up in Germany in the late eighteenth century,
in the shadow of the Hume/Rousseau/Kant Enlightenment. But Hegel drew on
the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Spinoza to explain how a God who

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    37

is in the world can at the same time be higher than it. Hegel showed in detail how
through our own liberation and the love that flows from it the world surpasses
itself, achieving something that, because it’s real “as itself,” is both higher and more
fully real than the world as such is, and which we can appropriately call “God.”
Hegel’s thorough explanation of this still unfamiliar idea was so complex that it has
been almost universally misunderstood, as I’ll indicate in the next chapter, where
I’ll sketch Hegel’s life and ideas and try to alleviate some of the major doubts about
Hegel that people may have.15
But Plato’s and Hegel’s basic idea keeps surfacing in the work of later writers.
In particular, it plays an important role, though without being expressed with
full clarity, in a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers from
Emerson through Wittgenstein and Whitehead to J. N. Findlay and Iris Murdoch
who discuss “mysticism” or something like it with great seriousness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) during his most creative years
was not aware of Hegel, but he drew on the same Platonic sources that Hegel drew
on, to describe a nurturing God within himself. “Within man is the soul of the
whole; . . . the eternal One.”16 Like Hegel’s “absolute spirit,” Emerson’s “over-soul” is
a title for the fuller reality that’s achieved by true freedom and the love that flows
from it.
In his most famous essay, entitled “Self-Reliance,” Emerson wrote that “Self-
existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of
good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms.” And “we lie in the lap
of immense intelligence, which makes us the receivers of its truth and organs of
its activity.”17 Thus, contrary to what many commentators suppose, what Emerson
means by “self-reliance” is not reliance on “oneself ” in the ordinary sense of the
word. Rather, the “self-reliance” that he’s recommending seeks to rely on a “self ”
that’s freed from conceptions that originate outside it, so that whatever it generates
will reflect its inner, genuine self: its “self-existence” and “truth.” So “self-reliance”
actually requires a kind of transcendence, from mere appetites and opinions to
something that’s more fully itself than a collection of appetites and opinions can
be. In this way, Emerson’s views are in line with traditional religion as well as with
Plato.
In his essay “The Over-Soul,” Emerson writes, “From within or from behind, a
light shines through us upon all things, and makes us aware that we are nothing,
but the light is all. . . . So there is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect,
ceases, and God, the cause, begins.”18 The light that shines from behind is a direct
borrowing from Plato’s Cave allegory; and that it shines also from “within,” and
“through us,” is Plotinus’s interpretation of what Plato means by his allegory. If “we

38   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

are nothing,” the “self ” on which we’re supposed to rely is clearly not “ourselves”
in the way that we ordinarily understand that term. Rather, it’s the “inner” or
“higher” self, to which Plato and Plotinus direct our attention.
Many commentators describe Emerson as a quintessentially “American”
writer, or as influenced (as he certainly was) by Hindu thought, or (sometimes)
as influenced by a “Neoplatonism” that they suggest is importantly different from
Plato’s own thought. I invite readers to consider the parallels that I’ve just pointed
out between Emerson’s formulations in “Self-Reliance” and “The Over-Soul” and
Plato’s Republic. My detailed discussion of Plato in later chapters should help
to confirm that no great divide separates so-called “Neoplatonism,” including
Emerson, from Plato himself.
Late in his life, after his period of greatest creativity was behind him, Emerson
became aware of Hegel’s work through English translations and praised it highly.19

After Hegel and Emerson

Emerson and Hegel have both had quite a lot of influence. Hegel had a group of
admirers in Britain, the “British Idealists” including Edward Caird, Francis Herbert
Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet, who dominated the British philosophical scene
in the latter part of the nineteenth century. I’ll say something about another self-
described admirer of Hegel, Karl Marx, in the next chapter. As for Emerson, he
was the biggest single influence on the most influential American poet, Walt
Whitman (Leaves of Grass [1855]), and Emerson is probably cited more than any
other American thinker down to our own day. The “New Age” movement with
its enthusiasm for nontraditional “spirituality” views Emerson and Whitman as
primary forerunners.
However, both Hegel and Emerson have been more admired than understood.
The Harvard philosopher/psychologist William James was the most influential
philosophical writer in the United States in the early twentieth century. James as a
child had known the elderly Emerson, and he always admired Emerson greatly. But
it’s clear from James’s writings, above all his The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), that James didn’t accept and probably didn’t understand the Platonic
conception of the “self ” with which Emerson worked. The notions of a “self-existing
Supreme Cause,” and that “we are nothing, but the light is all,” are not notions
that James knew how to take seriously.20 James was deeply interested in religious
experience, and especially in the moral transformation, from self-centeredness to
universal compassion, that often accompanies “mystical” experiences. But he had
no access to the Plato/Hegel explanation of what these experiences represent and
why they have these consequences.
James actually made it clear in a lecture that he gave in Oxford in the year
before his death in 1910 that he wished the British Idealists would help him to

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    39

understand these phenomena. They hadn’t provided an explanation that struck
him as helpful.21 It seems to me that the fault for this was not on James’s side. Unlike
Plato and Hegel, the British Idealists didn’t spell out any connection between
“mystical” reality and what we experience in our daily lives. They didn’t spell out
how rational freedom and love, with which we’re all familiar, constitute the higher
reality. Nor, consequently, did they explain how experience of the higher reality
might affect one’s daily life.
F. H. Bradley wrote about a mystical “reality” in his Appearance and Reality
(1893), but based it on abstract arguments against “relations” rather than on
the concrete efforts of individuals to be themselves. Bernard Bosanquet (What
Religion Is [1920], p. 12) relied on Bradley’s “You cannot be a whole, unless you
join a whole” (F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies [1927/1962], p. 79), and offered no
support for this (on the face of it) rather dogmatic claim. Bradley and Bosanquet
didn’t appreciate Plato’s and Hegel’s careful exposition of the connection between
personal wholeness and larger wholes via the relationship between inner freedom
and love (see Chapters 3, 7, and 8). Essentially Bradley and Bosanquet gave no
response to Glaucon’s challenge on behalf of rational egoism in book ii of Plato’s
Republic. Assuming that we will be interested in a kind of transcendence that
includes us in a larger whole, they didn’t take “commonsense” egoism seriously
and consequently they provided no bridge between it and transcendence. So they
couldn’t provide the explanation of how mystical experiences relate to ordinary
life which William James quite properly wished they might provide.
German philosophers after Hegel’s death were no more helpful in this regard
than the British were. Many of them were busy inventing new ways of thinking
about politics (Karl Marx) or psychology (Gustav Fechner). Europeans who were
sympathetic to religion, such as Hegel’s colleague Friedrich Schleiermacher and
the Danish writer Soren Kierkegaard, found Hegel too “intellectual.”

The gap
This reflected the widespread failure to grasp how rather than being an optional
interest that certain “intellectually inclined” individuals might have, Plato’s and
Hegel’s “ascent” is a pervasive and inescapable feature—we can call it “inner
freedom”—of everyday life. However “intellectual” we may or may not be, we all
know that our current opinions and desires can mislead us, and we can fail, by
blindly following them, to be in charge of our own lives. This knowledge of our
own capacity for being misled and for failing to be in charge of our lives fuels
our appreciation of whatever glimpses of truth and freedom we may experience
in people, in social movements, science, love, the arts, religion, and so forth.
Here, however, most recent philosophy fails to see how by making us more free
and more “ourselves,” our stepping back (if only momentarily) from our current

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opinions and desires connects us with the maximally free “self-existent” and thus
with the divine.
Missing this connection, many creative minds in the generations after Hegel
and Emerson, such as the atheist existentialists, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin
Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, followed pretty much in the path of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Positively, the existentialists emphasized our
capacity for inner freedom and for being fully ourselves. But failing to see that
what’s in us in inner freedom is the “self-existent” divine, they put up a wall against
the part of experience that we call “religious,” and thus limited the freedom that
they could actually achieve.22
On the other hand, writers who had great sympathy for religion, like Soren
Kierkegaard and William James, shared the atheists’ inability to connect religion
with our everyday experiences of inner freedom in personal decision-making,
science, the arts, love, and so forth. Neither side was able to bridge this gap.

Alfred North Whitehead

In the 1920s and 1930s, Alfred North Whitehead went a considerable distance
toward bridging this gap, by drawing heavily on Plato. In his Adventures of Ideas
(1933), Whitehead agrees with Plato’s Timaeus (48a) that, as Whitehead puts it,
“the creation of the world—that is to say, the world of civilized order—is the victory
of persuasion over force.”23 In his earlier Religion in the Making (1926), Whitehead
had given us the golden sentence that God “is the mirror which discloses to every
creature its own greatness.”24 This, no doubt, is how “persuasion” triumphs over
force.
Whitehead went on:

The kingdom of heaven is not the isolation of good from evil. It is the
overcoming of evil by good. . . . The power by which God sustains the world is
the power of himself as the ideal. . . . The world lives by its incarnation of God in
itself. . . . [God] is the binding element in the world. . . . [The world’s] adventure
is upwards and downwards. Whatever ceases to ascend, fails to preserve itself
. . . and decays by transmitting its nature to slighter occasions of actuality.25

This “victory of persuasion,” the role of the “ideal” in “sustaining the world,” and
the resulting “upwards and downwards” dimension of increasing or diminishing
self-governing reality are what all Platonists tell us about the divine Good. Rather
than being a self-enclosed separate being, as in “the isolation of good from evil,” the
Good is everywhere at work in the world by encouraging more integrated wholes
(“disclosing to every creature its own greatness”). Evil, then, rather than being a
force that’s diametrically opposed to the divine goodness, is merely our frequent

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    41

failure (as a result, no doubt, of deeply rooted preconceptions about what the good
for oneself might be) to appreciate this goodness itself and to respond to it.
So the bridge that Platonists and mystics identify between the divine and
everyday life is our shared yearning for wholeness or inner freedom: for “upward”
motion and the resulting “greatness.” Suitably explained, this bridge could have
satisfied William James’s desire to understand the relation between mystical
experiences and moral transformation.

Whitehead’s limitations
Judging, however, from the way Whitehead’s ideas have been received, more
explanation is likely to be needed than he himself provided. Whitehead’s broadly
Platonic synthesis, like Hegel’s, has in fact had only limited influence.26 I am
inclined to think that a major part of the reason for this is that Whitehead and
his followers have failed to unfold key parts of the Platonic picture, without
which it can’t be fully convincing. Whitehead spelled out the ideal of rational self-
government only in the most general possible terms, as in “every creature’s own
greatness,” and in particular he didn’t address the issues of the apparent rationality
of mere appetite-satisfaction and egoism.
Whitehead clearly believes that the archetypal hedonists or egoists (Callicles,
Thrasymachus, Alcibiades), whom Plato describes in his Gorgias, Republic, and
Symposium, do not achieve their “own greatness.” But why is this the case? What is
“greatness,” and why would we pursue it? What is it that gives appetite-satisfaction
and egoism their initial plausibility, and what undermines that plausibility in the
final analysis? What is it to be true to “oneself ”? Whitehead doesn’t pose these
questions or give more than hints about how to answer them. Nor, as far as I can
see, do his successors in “process philosophy” or “process theology” do this.27
But in the absence of an understanding of these issues, we don’t really understand
the role of reason in the world, or the higher reality that reason, according to
Platonism, constitutes. A rational mysticism requires a developed understanding
of how appetite and self-importance, on the one hand, and freedom, love, truth,
and “greatness,” on the other hand, relate to each other. It requires an account of
what I’ve been calling our “identity crisis.” Whitehead doesn’t give an account of
our identity crisis, as such, so his work lacks the power that a full account of our
experience would have.
In his Science and the Modern World (1925), Whitehead describes how science
as “the instinctive faith that there is an Order of Nature” (p. 6) has transformed our
relation to the world. The early moderns, Whitehead says, were confident that such
an Order would exist because their religion taught the idea of a rational Creator.
But why would such appetitive, selfish, and fearful creatures as we are, ever be
at all interested either in an Order of Nature or in a rational Creator? What do

42   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

these things have to do with us? Plato’s and Hegel’s response is that we seek “from
having been many things to become entirely one” (Republic 443e, adapted). The
function of reason, and thus also of the sciences’ pursuit of the Order of Nature,
is to enable us to be governed by ourselves rather than simply by the appetites,
opinions, and self-importance that our history and our environment have instilled
in us. Thus the sciences are part of the project of unifying or creating a higher
whole, a true self: they are part of the identity crisis and the higher reality that are
the themes of religion as well as of Platonism. In this way, a full understanding
of what the sciences do for us shows what they have in common with religion.
When we take the human identity crisis of appetite and selfishness versus reason
and self-unification in its full seriousness, as Platonism does, then the higher
phenomena of inner freedom, love, ethics, religion, and science each take their
proper place within the picture and cease even to appear to be in competition with
one another.28
Like Bradley, Whitehead didn’t say enough about the content of ordinary
human experience, as in (for example) the apparent rationality of mere
appetite-satisfaction and egoism, to bring out the crisis and the drama that
are involved in the emergence of a fully integrated self from such concerns.
This crisis and this drama are the theme of Plato’s and of Hegel’s work as well
as of religion. By expounding them, Plato and Hegel show in what sense we
“live and move and have our being” (that is, our true being) in a higher reality.
It’s only within an overt drama of higher versus lower, that either religion or
science has a point.
And it’s also only in such an overt drama that we can recognize what religion
has in common with science, inasmuch as they both seek to rise above mere
appetite, opinion, self-importance, and so forth. If we underestimate the drama,
the “identity crisis,” in which we’re all engaged, we can easily lapse into viewing our
various activities (religion, science, art, ethics, etc.) as merely disparate “interests,”
rather than as aspects of an overarching project in which we’re always, in various
ways, engaged. And then the question of how these various interests relate to each
other will tend to be pretty impenetrable.

We take too much for granted

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, two things have happened. First, the
drama that religion addresses can no longer be assumed as philosophy’s unspoken
background. Many of us have lost track of the human experiences that are summed
up in the notions of temptation, sin, salvation, and so forth. And second, those of
us who admire science have come to take it so much for granted that we no longer
realize what a surprising phenomenon it is. We assume, as we should not, that
humans will be interested in truth as such. This drama, too, is lost on us.

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    43

 The beauty of Whitehead’s writings is how wide-eyed and open-minded
he is in regard to the great phenomena of human civilization, and above all in
regard to both religion and science. He loves them both, on some deep level, and
can’t imagine rejecting one in favor of the other. But his difficulty is what I just
described: that for many of us, in the twentieth century, the deep point of both of
these great phenomena has been lost. Whitehead’s effort to “fuse . . . religion and
science into one rational scheme of thought” hasn’t been appreciated or assimilated
because we haven’t seen the background, the “identity crisis” drama, in relation to
which religion and science are indeed partners in a single great project of ascent.
Whitehead himself didn’t spell out this drama as a crisis, nor have his successors
done so. To Whitehead himself, this drama perhaps went without saying. But for
many of his contemporaries, and for succeeding generations, it hasn’t gone without
saying. It needs to be spelled out.
This need became evident immediately among Whitehead’s contemporaries
in academic philosophy. Bertrand Russell, Whitehead’s former collaborator at
Cambridge University, and George Edward (“G. E.”) Moore, their other leading
colleague there, had no instinctive sense either of what religion is about or of what
religion and science might have in common. In his essay “The Value of Religion”
(1901), Moore saw no reason to go beyond ethical and aesthetic values to any
notion of a divine “being” or reality. He had no inkling of how something that’s
guided by the Good might thereby be more self-governing and thus more real as
itself than what’s guided merely by its physical environment.
And Russell, in his various writings on Plato and “mysticism,” regarded Plato’s
connecting the Good with reality as amounting to wishful thinking. If Russell
read Whitehead’s Platonic teaching in the final chapter of Religion in the Making
(1926), it didn’t alter his view of this issue at all.29 Russell and Moore needed more
explicit instruction than Bradley, Bosanquet, or Whitehead gave them regarding
the greater reality “as oneself ” (what Whitehead called the “greatness”) to which
the pursuit of the Good, as opposed to appetite, opinion, or self-importance, gives
rise.
Russell’s failure to grasp Plato’s point about how the Good makes possible a fuller
reality is particularly sad in view of Russell’s recognition in his essay “Mysticism
and Logic” that “the possibility of this universal love and joy in all that exists is of
supreme importance for the conduct and happiness of life, and gives inestimable
value to the mystic emotion.”30 He doesn’t try to explain how it can be rational to
attach so much importance to an “emotion” when we understand, following his
doctrine, that this emotion responds to nothing that we have any good reason to
regard as real.
Since Bradley, like Whitehead later on, had provided no account of greater
reality “as oneself ” or what Whitehead called “every creature’s own greatness,” it
had been reasonable for critics like Moore and Russell to suppose that Bradley’s
fundamental doctrine was the familiar one that the only reality is minds and the

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ideas that they contain. This, Moore and Russell not unreasonably supposed, was
what the mystical “reality,” the hidden truth, that Bradley was driving at, amounted
to.31 Bradley gave them no sense of a vertical dimension of increasing reality.
And Whitehead’s remarks about “every creature’s own greatness” are simply too
undeveloped to bring out the process of ascent and increasing reality “as oneself,”
the crisis and the higher reality, which we need to see and understand in order to
understand what Whitehead is really attracted to in religion.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
In view of this failure of Bradley, Bosanquet, and Whitehead to convey what at
least Whitehead and probably the others as well were really concerned about,
what’s surprising is that the topic of mysticism nevertheless did not disappear
completely from discussions in Moore’s and Russell’s Cambridge. Russell’s
student, Ludwig Wittgenstein in fact gave a kind of mysticism a central role in his
influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), thus following in the footsteps,
despite Moore’s and Russell’s critique, of Bradley (and of William James). Here
was the young genius of the new philosophical movement focusing on precisely
the same obscure issue on which the previous generation had focused and on
which Moore and Russell, for their part, had pretty much given up as a will-o-
the-wisp.
In his book, Wittgenstein proposes a sharp division between what is “inside”
space and time and what is “outside” of them (6.4312), asserting that “God does
not reveal himself in the world” (6.432).32 On the other hand, “To view the world
sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—as a limited whole. Feeling the world
as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical” (6.45). Science deals with questions
about the “world,” and “we feel that even when all possible scientific questions
have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched” (6.52).
For these problems can’t be dealt with, can’t even be “expressed,” in scientific terms.
“Ethics,” for example, “cannot be expressed” (6.421). “Propositions can express
nothing that is higher” (6.42). “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself:
it is the mystical” (6.522). But “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in
silence” (7). That is, the “mystical,” including ethics, all the “problems of life,” and
everything “higher,” is properly a realm of silence.
As Russell pointed out in his Introduction to Wittgenstein’s book, Wittgenstein
himself had managed to say a good deal about the things that we “cannot speak
about.” Wittgenstein was aware of this, asserting that the propositions of his
book should be “thrown away” like a ladder after one had climbed up them to
the realization that they are, properly speaking, “nonsensical” (6.54). What he left
us with is the blank duality of what one can “speak about” in a scientific manner
versus ethics and everything “higher,” with regard to which one should, properly

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    45

speaking, be silent. That the “mystical” and the “higher” “shows itself ” is not very
consoling, when one is told that one must ultimately “pass [it] over in silence.”
Wittgenstein explains his notions of the “mystical” and of its “showing itself ”
by their opposition to “the world” and its being “expressed,” of which he gives an
elaborate analysis in the greater part of his book. He uses traditional, redolent
words, “value,” “ethics,” “higher,” “mystical,” and “God,” but he doesn’t enter into
or explain their content. It would be natural to want to ask, in what sense are this
“value,” “ethics,” “mystical,” and “God” truly “higher” than the world of “facts”? To
make sense of this claim, we would need some dimension along which the two
realms can be compared; but Wittgenstein’s thesis seems to be that there is no such
dimension. One can’t speak of the two realms in the same language (since one
realm one can’t literally “speak of ” at all). So there is no “sense” in describing one
realm as “higher” than the other.

Wittgenstein’s partial Platonism

Wittgenstein’s preparatory notebooks for the Tractatus do give some suggestive
help with this issue. In them, he compared our relation to the world to our relation
to a work of art: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the
good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between
art and ethics.”33 In order to see the point of ethics, Wittgenstein suggests, we need
to see the world as a completed whole, like a work of art. Then he writes,

As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant; as a world, each

one is equally significant. If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am
told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For
this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many
things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove, it was my world, and
everything else was colorless by contrast with it. . . . For it is equally possible to
take the bare present image as the worthless momentary picture in the whole
temporal world, or as the true world among shadows.34

If I was “contemplating” the stove, “it was my world,” it was a completed whole, “the
true world among shadows.” This contrast between the “true world” and “shadows”
strongly reminds us of Plato’s Cave. We find the “true world,” Wittgenstein
suggests, the world that has “color” and is no longer “worthless,” through what he’s
calling “contemplating” (kontemplieren) the object. In this way a kind of ascent
takes place, from “shadows” to the true world of color and value. What’s crucial,
evidently, is to view the stove as itself, and not merely as “one among the many
things in the world”: to see it as complete in itself, as we see a work of art. If we
could see the world itself in the way that Wittgenstein imagines himself seeing the

46   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

stove, as itself and not merely “one among the many things,” then apparently we
would see its value, its “color,” and we would have the “good life.”
Here Wittgenstein captures one of Plato’s basic thoughts, that the thing
appreciated as “itself,” and not merely as “one among many,” is the true thing
and the locus of value. So this is a sense in which we could say that one realm is
“higher” than the other. One realm or the objects within it are contemplated as
themselves, and not merely as “one among the many things.”
However, under the Tractatus’s “silence” doctrine, this whole explanation too
would strictly have to be dismissed, because it goes beyond what we can “speak of.”35
What Plato and Hegel do and Wittgenstein does not do is to link the contemplation
of “itself ”-ness to our experience of ourselves, as (potentially) whole and thereby
“true” (as in “the true world”). Plato and Hegel agree with Wittgenstein that the
higher, “true” realm isn’t conceivable from within the lower one, which is “colorless”
and without “value.” But they point out that we experience the lower realm not by
itself, but in its dynamic relationship to the higher one, in what I’ve called our
“identity crisis” between lower and higher conceptions of ourselves. If this identity
crisis is our primary experience, then we do have access to a dimension in which
the two realms are comparable. It’s the dimension of our own potential wholeness,
freedom, or being ourselves, as opposed to fragmentariness, heteronomy, and not
being ourselves.
In religion this is the dimension of “temptation,” in which a person’s
appetites and self-importance distract the person from his or her higher
calling. Plato and Hegel both elaborate on this traditional dramatic pattern:
Plato with his account of eros and the unification of the soul and Hegel with
his account of “sublation” (Aufhebung, “lifting up”) as the way Nature becomes
Spirit or selfhood. In both cases the traditional drama is explained as the
drama of overcoming natural obstacles in order to become fully oneself. Nor
is this only a “moral” drama, in the usual sense of the word; for the pursuit of
truth is a part of the same drama insofar as we must constantly choose between
pursuing truth and protecting our self-importance, by protecting our current
opinions. So in both the moral version and the epistemological version of the
drama, we choose between lower attractions and the higher aspiration through
which we can be fully ourselves, and real as ourselves, and thus contribute the
fullest reality to the world.
But in his preoccupation with sheer description of the “world,” as such, and with
“value” and “God” as counterposed to it, Wittgenstein omits both versions of this
traditional inner drama, and with them our contribution to value and God, or full
reality. Despite what he wrote in his notebooks about the “true world,” he doesn’t
get into focus the way in which our inner effort and inner drama contribute to that
world.36 And thus he unintentionally encourages the subsequent descent of much
English-language philosophy into mere scientism, the doctrine that only the study
of objective “facts” is really rational.37

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    47

Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer
It seems that Wittgenstein’s notion of the “mystical” was heavily influenced by
Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of it, in his widely read The World as Will and
Representation (1958, first published 1818). Schopenhauer had been eighteen years
younger than Hegel and had competed with him briefly as a university lecturer
in Berlin. Schopenhauer’s bleak view of the world as a realm of irrational “will”
struck several generations of readers as inspiring in its disillusioned “realism,”
while his mystical side reminded people of Buddhism. And Wittgenstein read
Schopenhauer with enthusiasm in his youth.38
But Schopenhauer’s notion of what we might call the “higher” (mysticism)
is neither motivated nor rationally accessible from within the “lower” (what
Schopenhauer calls the “will”). Schopenhauer does find glimpses of liberation
in the human capacity for compassion and in art, but he doesn’t explain how
these can be present in the world that by its nature is pervaded by irrational
“will.” Instead, what Schopenhauer offers is, in effect, a blank, unmediated
dualism. There is no intelligible relation between the lower side and the
higher side.
And Wittgenstein’s model is similar: an interesting dual “metaphysics,” but
with no mediation between lower and higher through either an account of our
“soul” or identity, or a narrative line. One can appreciate Schopenhauer’s and
Wittgenstein’s celebration of “the mystical” without feeling that they respond
adequately to our need to understand it. Nor, consequently, do they respond to
our need for freedom. Dualisms such as they present deprive us not only of any
unifying “sense” but also of real freedom, since freedom without sense winds up
being, effectively, arbitrariness.

After Wittgenstein
Unfortunately, philosophers who couldn’t see how to appropriate Wittgenstein’s
dualistic “mystical” did not, in general, go in search of a more intelligible version
of mysticism. Not finding clarity on this issue in Bradley or in Whitehead, they
abandoned, as Moore and Russell had done before them, the whole notion of a
higher reality. And what they were left with was, in general, scientism.
When Alfred Jules Ayer asserted in his Language, Truth, and Logic (1946, first
published 1936) that “statements of value . . . are simply expressions of emotion
which can be neither true nor false,” he assumed that he was merely restating
(among other things) Wittgenstein’s doctrine in the Tractatus that ethics “cannot
be expressed” in a logical form.39 Ayer gave no attention to Wittgenstein’s allusions
to what “shows itself,” nor to what Wittgenstein might have meant by his gnomic
remarks about “value,” “God,” and “the mystical.”40 Though it can be said in Ayer’s

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defense that Ayer had even less text from which to understand Wittgenstein’s
early thinking than we have, because Wittgenstein’s preparatory notebooks for the
Tractatus weren’t published until years after Ayer wrote his book. And of course it’s
true that science is an amazing human accomplishment.
Contrary to Wittgenstein’s notion in his notebooks of the “good life” as “the
true world,” Ayer dismissed all questions of value as mere “emotion.” Since they
weren’t capable of being discussed rationally, he felt no need to say or do anything
constructive about them. This was effectively nihilism. Given the difficulty of
articulating in a useful way Wittgenstein’s notion of what “shows itself,” it’s hard
to blame Ayer for drawing this conclusion—if he wasn’t prepared to look further
than Wittgenstein and Russell for help.
Due, then, to the unsolved problems that Bradley, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein
had left behind them, an anti-Platonist scientism resembling Ayer’s had a
hegemony over English-speaking philosophy in the mid-twentieth century, in
writers like Rudolf Carnap, who moved from Vienna to the United States, and
Willard Van Orman Quine at Harvard. Today, following Quine, what amounts to
the same view presents itself in the guise of “naturalism,” which is just as dogmatic
as Ayer’s scientism in its a priori exclusion of the idea of higher degrees of reality
or a higher standard than “nature.” On the other hand, the whole history of
English-language “meta-ethics” during the latter half of the twentieth century, in
writers such as Richard Hare, Philippa Foot, David Gauthier, Allan Gibbard, John
McDowell, Christine Korsgaard, and Thomas Scanlon, is a protracted effort to find
a way of thinking about value which would escape the ethical nihilism to which a
fascination with science had led the previous generation.
One natural though extreme response to this situation was to hold science itself
responsible for it, as Martin Heidegger did when he described science as a part of
the modern “demonic” “enfeeblement” of spirit.41 The major streams of twentieth-
century philosophy, the scientistic and the anti-scientist, were so to speak hypnotized
by science, either worshipping it or demonizing it. And Wittgenstein’s dichotomy
of what can be “expressed” and what “shows itself ” didn’t show a way out of this
hypnosis, insofar as it didn’t make the relationship between the two intelligible.
None of these thinkers noted how by pursuing truth rather than appetite-
satisfaction or self-importance or the confirming of preexisting opinions, the
activity of science itself surpassed “nature” in an important way and thus helped
to constitute a higher, “supernatural” reality. So that science falls into place among
the several ways, including ethics, love, the arts, and religion, in which humans
intermittently surpass “nature” and thus participate in a higher reality.
A comprehensive view of these forms of ascent, such as Plato and Hegel
adumbrate, gives us a freedom that the dominant twentieth- and twenty-first-
century views can’t give us because they all involve unresolved and apparently
arbitrary boundaries, such as the boundary between science and the “humanities”
or between what can be expressed and what “shows itself.”

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    49

 Fortunately, a number of recent writers have tried to be more integrative
than the pro- and anti-science schools of thought. Among them, I will discuss
John Niemeyer Findlay (1903–87), Iris Murdoch (1919–99), Wilfrid Sellars
(1912–89), John McDowell (1942–), and Sebastian Rödl (1967–). For lack of
space I am going to have to omit, with regret, a discussion of the work of
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), in his Personal Knowledge (1958) and other
works, which presented a basically Platonic ontology, epistemology, and
theology, deeply grounded in twentieth-century science and very creative in
its categorial structure.

J. N. Findlay’s “Transcendence of
the Cave”
Having written separate books on Plato, Kant, and Hegel, plus two volumes of
Gifford Lectures, The Discipline of the Cave (1966) and The Transcendence of the
Cave (1967), in which he developed his own version of philosophical mysticism,
John Niemeyer Findlay should, it seems, have made the present book unnecessary.
I treasure large parts of, especially, The Transcendence of the Cave. But I have
problems with Findlay’s work.
I’ll begin with the historical issue. Regarding Plato and Hegel, both of whom
he greatly admires, Plato is Findlay’s exemplar of philosophical “transcendence,”
as in “the transcendence of the cave,” while he takes Hegel, by contrast, to be an
advocate of a “radically immanent teleology.”42 It hasn’t occurred to Findlay that
one could understand Hegel as justifiably criticizing conventional conceptions of
“transcendence” and advocating an alternative “true transcendence” which would
parallel Hegel’s well-known “true infinity.” So that Hegel like Aristotle would be a
great “Platonist,” in an important sense of the term, who agrees with Plato about
the centrality of “ascent” (i.e., transcendence) and with a great deal of Plato’s work
about the integral role of the body within that process of ascent.
In his Hegel: A Re-Examination (1958), Findlay’s interpretation of Hegel’s
doctrine of true infinity is that

true Infinity is . . . simply finitude associated with free variability. A mathematical

or logical formula is “infinite” in the Hegelian sense since it admits of an
indefinite number of valid substitutions. I, the subject, am likewise infinite,
since I can, without prejudice to my identity, imagine myself in anyone and
everyone’s shoes. (p. 164; emphases altered)

What is missing from this interpretation is the notion of freedom as self-

determination. Hegel’s critique of the finite, the critique that makes the finite

50   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

give way to the infinite, is that the finite isn’t really itself (isn’t “an sich”) because
it is made what it is by its relationships to innumerable other finite things. And
likewise his critique of the “spurious infinite” (schlechte Unendlichkeit) that is
defined as not being the finite is that the spurious infinite equally fails to be
self-determining, because it’s defined and determined by this relationship of
not being the finite. So the whole point of true infinity is that it achieves self-
determination, by including the finite within itself by being the finite’s going
beyond itself. As Hegel says, “Infinity is only as a self-transcending of the finite.”43
None of this is captured by notions of “free variability” or “imagining oneself ”
in other people’s shoes.
What we need to realize is that Hegel’s critique of the finite and of the spurious
infinite is also, in effect, a critique of ordinary conceptions of transcendence, such
as Findlay relies on when he asserts, in The Transcendence of the Cave, that he
will go beyond Hegel’s “cave.” Such an assertion, which defines the outcome by its
contrast to what it supposedly goes beyond, produces what is consequently merely
another finitude, limited by that contrast, and thus (in effect) another segment of
what is really just a single world, a single collection of finite things. There is no real
transcendence here.
In fact, however, it turns out that despite Findlay’s programmatic statements,
including the title of his Chapter 6, “Other-worldly Geography,” we learn within
that chapter that his “other world is . . . not so much another world as another half
of one world, which two halves only make full rounded sense when seen in their
mutual relevance and interconnection” (p. 121; emphasis added). In which case,
Findlay would not be flouting the principle of true infinity as he appears to with
his talk of “other-worldly geography.”
Thus I think that contrary to his programmatic claims, Findlay’s Transcendence
of the Cave can serve to illustrate and elaborate on what is, in fact, essentially the
same picture that Hegel presents. It is unfortunate that Findlay distracts us from
this relationship with his contrast between what he calls Platonic “other-worldly
geography” and Hegelian “immanent teleology.”
Underlying these historical and conceptual issues, the fundamental problem
with Transcendence of the Cave is that like Bradley, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein,
Findlay doesn’t focus on self-determining freedom or explain its role in connecting
our everyday experience with higher levels of reality. The absence of this lived
connection between lower and higher gives Findlay’s overall presentation a flavor
of detached intellectualism, which is only partially ameliorated by the charmingly
Wordsworthian poetical remarks in his final chapter. This may be part of the
reason why, as also happened with Bradley, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein,
Findlay’s philosophical mysticism has not found a wide audience and has not,
as far as I can tell, been further developed by the generation of philosophers that
came after him.

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    51

Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1993) contains the following
highly suggestive passage:

The work of art unifies our sensibility . . . while removing our petty egoistic
anxiety. The art object is an analogy of the person-object, we intuit our best
selves in its mirror.. . . Art with which we are familiar stays with us as an
intimation that love has power and the world makes sense. [And] we see in
God in a magnified form the analogy between work of art and person. (p. 81)

By focusing on the “art object” and the analogous “person-object,” Murdoch echoes
Wittgenstein’s analogy in his Notebooks between the work of art and the good life
(“The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the
world seen sub specie aeternitatis”). In both the art object and the (“best-self ”)
person-object one might say there is a wholeness that we miss when we view the
object, as Wittgenstein said, merely as “one among the many things in the world.”
With her suggestion that the art work’s unifying of our sensibility removes “our
petty egoistic anxiety,” Murdoch conjures up the “identity crisis” drama that is
fundamental for Platonism. Will we achieve wholeness, or will we remain mere
collections of appetites, opinions, and self-importance? For the wholeness that is
egoism’s opposite, Murdoch uses the same image that Whitehead used: the mirror
in which we see “our best selves” (in Whitehead, our “greatness”). For Murdoch as
for Wittgenstein and Whitehead, God is the most comprehensive instance (“in a
magnified form”) of this unifying wholeness that we see initially in art and in the
person.
And finally Murdoch elaborates art’s role and, by implication, the roles of
person and God as well, with her description of art as “an intimation that love has
power and the world makes sense.” She is suggesting that we should understand
our unification or wholeness, and our ascent toward them, as a function of love.
What love is, what kind of power it has, and how the world can make sense—
this is indeed a great part of what the Platonic tradition aims to show us. Like
Plato and Hegel, Murdoch unifies art, life, and God through their shared theme of
unification through love.44
This unification is why she can say later on that “no existing thing could be
what we have meant by God. Any existing God would be less than God” (p. 508).
For, as Hegel and Plato explain, every existing thing is bounded and constrained
by other existing things, and thus can’t be entirely itself, entirely unified. “But,”
Murdoch goes on, “what led us to conceive of [God] does exist and is constantly
experienced and pictured,” in, I presume, our experience (which points beyond
the limits of mere existing things) of unification and wholeness in ourselves and in
art. If we think of God not as an existing thing among others but as a unification

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(“sub specie aeternitatis,” as Wittgenstein puts it) that goes beyond everything that
exists among other things, we perhaps glimpse what God-talk has really wanted
to be about.
Unfortunately, Murdoch doesn’t address fundamental questions that the Plato/
Hegel tradition addresses in detail, in particular, the issue of the relation between
art/persons/God and the physical sciences, and the issue of the relation between
rationality and morality. (If egoism is “petty,” why do so many theorists regard it
as a fully rational policy?) So what Murdoch gives us is only a brilliant portion of
Platonism.

Wilfrid Sellars’s “incipient Meditations

Hegeliennes”
Now I turn to two recent thinkers who are aware of having a significant affinity
to Hegel, though neither of them endorses a “higher” reality or mysticism, as
such. Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell resemble Hegel in that they each make a
systematic effort to (as Sellars puts it) “fuse into one vision” the scientific and the
humanistic points of view.45
Sellars sought to unite the descriptive and explanatory resources of science
with the “language of community and individual intentions,” which “provide[s]
the ambience of principles and standards (above all, those which make meaningful
discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual
lives.”46 Thus Sellars recognized that science itself, as a rational endeavor,
presupposes an “ambience of principles and standards” which may or may not be
recognized by particular sciences as being objectively present in what they study,
but which will be recognized by self-aware scientists as the preconditions of the
rational inquiry that they aim to engage in. Here Sellars departs in an important
way from conventional “naturalism,” and of course I applaud his doing so. He is
acknowledging that not all truth can necessarily be grasped by the methods of the
natural sciences.
However, it’s not clear how successful Sellars is in “fusing” the space of
reasons, or normativity, with the space of natural laws. That self-aware scientists
must acknowledge the authority of something other than natural laws doesn’t
settle the question of what “community and individual intentions” in particular
they should acknowledge. Most fundamentally, one might ask, why should
communities or individuals embrace anything like science, at all? Why should we
think of ourselves as rational beings? There is after all a tradition from Epicurus
through David Hume which asserts that reason is and ought to be the slave of the
passions—that is, that knowledge and truth, as such, are distractions from the real
business of human life. If this tradition is correct, then Sellars’s “space of reasons”

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    53

is a mere distraction. Sellars assumes throughout his work that we are interested
in knowledge, truth, and science, and not merely in satisfying whatever desires we
may have. But insofar as he doesn’t show why this is or ought to be the case, he
doesn’t fully “fuse” the human realm, including the pursuit of truth and science,
with the world as the sciences describe and explain it. For he hasn’t demonstrated
why the human realm needs to include the pursuit of truth and science.
A second problem is, in fact, acknowledged by Sellars at the end of his Science
and Metaphysics (1968), where he says that although he thinks he has shown that
thinking of oneself as a rational being entails accepting epistemic oughts that are
binding on all rational beings, he can’t show that a rational being is obliged to
concern herself about the general (not merely epistemic) welfare of all rational
beings (pp. 225–6). That is, he can’t show that a rational being needs to be moral.
With regard to both of these problems, Plato and Hegel are more thorough.
Regarding the question of why we should think of ourselves as rational beings,
Plato and Hegel describe the role of the pursuit of truth in our becoming self-
governing and thus fully ourselves, rather than being mere puppets of our heritage
and environment. Kant, too, picks up this theme in a major way, with his notion of
rational “autonomy.” Sellars, however, in his extensive discussion of Kant, doesn’t
focus on autonomy. Like the many other twentieth-century thinkers who take
science too much for granted, Sellars doesn’t articulate the drama of “higher” versus
“lower” goals and satisfactions. Lacking this grounding in common experience,
his effort to overcome the dualism of the sciences versus the humanities can’t be
fully successful.
As for the issue of why a rational being should regard itself as part of a moral
community, Plato and Hegel again focus on the way in which rational functioning
is self-government. Insofar as one seeks to be self-governing, one must not be
governed by the boundary between oneself and others, because this would entail
being governed by something (namely, the boundary) that’s other than oneself.
Hence, nothing that’s fully self-governing can make a primary issue, as the
paradigmatic nonmoral agent does, of the boundary between itself and others.
Rather, the “I” that fully governs itself must become a boundless “we.”
This transition to a kind of “infinity,” which Hegel spells out in his Science of
Logic and his Encyclopedia and Plato adumbrates in his Republic, Symposium,
Theaetetus, and Timaeus cannot be made if one assumes, as Sellars does, that
persons are simply finite beings. One result of this assumption, as Plato and Hegel
point out, is that neither you nor I can be fully self-governing. And a second result
is that neither you nor I, so conceived, are rationally required to concern ourselves
about the welfare of others.
So when Sellars referred to his essay on “Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind” as his “incipient Meditations Hegeliennes,”47 he was neither alluding
to the essential feature of Hegel’s thought which is his notion of rational self-
government and his resulting critique of and transcendence of the finite, nor, of

54   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

course, drawing on Plato’s parallel thoughts (which I’ll discuss in Chapters 7 and
8). And consequently both the general importance of Sellars’s “space of reasons,”
and its ethical content, remain unclear. But without clarity on these issues, we
haven’t “fused” the world as it’s understood by the sciences with some of the most
important features of our individual and communal functioning.

John McDowell’s “Partial Enchantment”

Like Hegel and Sellars, John McDowell in his Mind and World (1994) wants to
overcome the modern dualism in which “reason is separated from our animal
nature” (p. 108), and we consequently have trouble understanding how they can
relate to each other and interact. This problem of interaction takes two forms. First,
it’s difficult to understand how the products of reason, its concepts, can apply to
nonrational nature. Coming, as they do, from a different source, there seems to be
no guarantee that they will have anything to do with the nature that we hope they
will illuminate. “The more we play up the connection between reason and freedom,
the more we risk losing our grip on how exercises of concepts can constitute
warranted judgments about the world. What we wanted to conceive as exercises of
concepts threaten to degenerate into moves in a self-contained game” (p. 5).48
And second, reason’s separation from our animal nature threatens us with
a “disenchantment” (as Max Weber called it) which would empty nature of
“meaning” (pp. 70–71). The world, viewed as nature, would be understood simply
as a realm of natural laws, and not of reasons.
McDowell’s response to the first (epistemological) form of the problem, how
our concepts apply to a world that has a different source from theirs, is to suggest
that since we’re always viewing the world through our concepts, we can’t view the
relation between our concepts and nature from the “sideways-on” perspective that
the supposed problem presupposes (pp. 34–36). The problem arises for us only in
a realm of abstraction that has nothing to do with our actual lives.
As for the second (metaphysical) form of the problem, McDowell’s way of
preserving meaning in the world is to “keep nature as it were partially enchanted”
(p. 85) by insisting on the reality of a “second nature” such as Aristotle suggested
with his notion of ethical habituation, in Nicomachean Ethics book ii. The ethical
habituation that Aristotle describes is, McDowell suggests, “a particular case of a
general phenomenon: initiation into conceptual capacities . . . having one’s eyes
opened to reasons at large” (p. 84). “Such initiation,” McDowell says,

is a normal part of what it is for a human being to come to maturity, and that
is why, although the structure of the space of reasons is alien to the layout of
nature conceived as the realm of law, it does not take on the remoteness from
the human that rampant platonism envisages. (p. 84)

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    55

(By “rampant platonism,” I imagine McDowell is referring to the antagonistic
dualism that people often find in Plato’s Phaedo, which I’ll discuss in Chapter 5.)
McDowell says that his picture of humans being initiated, through habituation,
into conceptual capacities, “gives human reason enough of a foothold in the realm
of law to satisfy any proper respect for modern natural science” (p. 84). That is,
McDowell’s picture shows how a creature that’s based in the realm of natural law
nevertheless rises (as I would say) above it, when it learns to respond to (ethical and
other) reasons. This proposal seems to address both forms of the issue of reason’s
separation from our animal nature. It addresses the issue of “disenchantment” by
giving us a world of reasons, and not just of natural laws; and it addresses the issue
of how our rational concepts apply to the world of natural laws, by giving reason a
“foothold” in that realm.
However, regarding his explanation of the “general phenomenon” of “initiation
into conceptual capacities,” McDowell like Sellars doesn’t ask why we should regard
such initiation as desirable. Why should we be guided by what McDowell regards
as “normal human maturity”? Why are “concepts” preferable to merely reactive
modes of functioning? If we say that concepts promise access to truth, we’ll then
have to explain why access to truth is desirable. It isn’t helpful to say that we’ve
simply been habituated to the rational kind of functioning, when David Hume
and others regularly tell us that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.
I imagine McDowell might respond to these Humean doubts with the same
quietism that was his response to the first form of the problem of reason versus our
animal nature. We have in fact been initiated into conceptual capacities, we see the
world through them, and that’s, for us, the end of the matter.
But I have to ask, in response to McDowell’s solution to both of these problems,
doesn’t it forcibly foreclose a natural inquiry? Naturalism has, in fact, been an
ongoing preoccupation of inquirers since the atomists and sophists of ancient
Greece. And it seems that we’re quite familiar, not only in theoretical speculations
but in everyday life, with the kinds of questions that naturalism tries, in its limited
way, to explore. As when we face the question whether to satisfy a bodily desire
or to curb it; or whether to maintain our opinion stoutly against criticism, or to
try looking at the issue from our opponent’s point of view as well as our own.
These are familiar, everyday, practical questions. Not asking why initiation into
conceptual capacities is desirable, McDowell doesn’t identify or address the
permanent “identity crisis” in which we’re constantly having to decide whether, in
fact, to be guided by reason or by our animal nature.
And it seems that our experience of this identity crisis should also be the key to
grasping the relation between reason and our animal nature. There is nothing that
we know better than this relation, with which most of us struggle, to one degree or
another, every day. We know our animal nature by its contrast to reason, and we
know reason by its contrast to our animal nature. This contrast is, as Hegel says,
“concrete.” Its extremes, when abstracted from the experience, are, in comparison,

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abstract.49 The extremes, codified in naturalism and in “rampant Platonism,” are
what Kant, Sellars, and McDowell are struggling with. The solution, Plato and
Hegel propose, is to focus not on the extremes as separate from each other but on
our concrete experience of having to choose between them. Seen in that context,
the relation between the extremes couldn’t be clearer. It’s only the abstractions that
result from one-sided responses to the relation that land us in apparently insoluble
problems.

McDowell and Hegel’s “I am not

in an other”
McDowell draws attention on p. 44 of Mind and World to the fact that Hegel
addresses the issue of reason’s relation to our animal nature with his assertion in
the “Self-Consciousness” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit that “in thinking
. . . I am not in an other” (§197; SuW 3:156). In his article “The Apperceptive I
and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’
in Hegel’s Phenomenology” (2003), McDowell aims to show in some detail how
Hegel’s “Self-Consciousness” chapter resolves the issue of reason’s relation to our
animal nature. And McDowell does show how, contrary to first appearances, the
famous “Lordship and Bondage” section of the chapter can be understood as
contributing to this project.50 But McDowell omits what I take to be a crucial part
of Hegel’s argument, a part that in fact makes the argument more illuminating
than what McDowell finds in it.
I show in my Hegel book (Wallace [2005], Chapters 3–6) that Hegel’s account
of reason’s relation to our animal nature is that reason (as “infinity,” the “Concept,”
or “Spirit”) is the self-transcending of our animal nature (as the “finite,” “Substance,”
or “Nature”). The sentence that McDowell quotes from the Phenomenology of
Spirit (“In thinking . . . I am not in an other”) in fact sums up what results from
the “infinity” that Hegel had arrived at in the previous chapter (§§160-163; TWA
3:131-133). What Hegel calls “self-consciousness,” the topic of the new chapter,
is introduced in §163 (TWA 3:133) of the previous chapter as summing up that
“infinity.”
To be more specific about this “infinity,” it’s helpful to turn to Hegel’s Science
of Logic, in which he describes infinity more perspicuously than he does in the
Phenomenology, where his account is shrouded in metaphor. In the Science of
Logic, Hegel describes infinity as the finite’s transcending or “sublating” itself:

Infinity is only as a self-transcending [Hinausgehen über sich] of the finite. . . .

The finite is not sublated [aufgehoben] by the infinite as by a power existing
outside it; on the contrary, its infinity consists in sublating its own self.51

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    57

I have repeatedly mentioned the reason for this position that Hegel takes,
which is that an “infinity” or “transcendence” which was “a power existing
outside” the finite or the immanent, would fail to be infinite or to transcend,
since it would be bounded by the finite and thus it would itself be finite, like
what it aims to transcend. It would be what Hegel calls a “spurious infinity”
(schlechte Unendlichkeit), something that was supposed to be infinite but
failed.
Now in the sentence that McDowell quotes from the Phenomenology,
Hegel assumes that the “thinking” to which he refers is infinite, and truly (not
“spuriously”) so. (Just as, later on in Hegel’s system, the Concept’s “subjectivity”
is truly infinite in relation to Substance’s finitude, and Spirit is truly infinite in
relation to Nature.) And thus the reason why, as Hegel says, this “thinking”
isn’t “in” something that’s “other” than itself is that a true infinity, as he says
in the Logic, “is only as a self-transcending of the finite,” and in that sense
it’s “in,” rather than being “other than,” what it transcends and thinks about.
Thus the “reason” that McDowell refers to, and which Hegel refers to in the
quoted sentence (Phenomenology of Spirit, §197) as “thinking,” “is” (in Hegel’s
words in the Logic) “only as a self-transcending of ” what McDowell calls our
“animal nature.” They are not fundamentally separate phenomena or realms:
the infinite, reason, and thinking are, as we might say, “in” the finite and “in”
“our animal nature,” inasmuch as they are the self-transcending of the finite and
of our animal nature.
Here Hegel is making the point that I’ve been making here: that what links
our experience of our animal nature to our experience of rational norms is our
experience of choosing between the two, and often of trying to rise above the one
to the other. Rational norms are “in” our animal nature insofar as they are the
effort of the animals that we are, to go beyond being merely animals.
So this is Hegel’s solution, which he elaborates in the third part of his
Logic as the “Concept” (Begriff) and in his Encyclopedia as “Spirit” (Geist),
to the modern dualism, which McDowell is addressing, of reason versus our
animal nature. Hegel’s solution applies to both the epistemological and the
metaphysical forms of the issue. On the epistemological side, it explains that
our rational concepts apply to the physical world because we belong, both
prior to and after our self-transcendence, to the physical world. What happens
here is Aufhebung, “sublation,” “lifting up,” rather than rejection. And on the
metaphysical side Hegel explains that thanks to that Aufhebung, that self-
transcendence, our world is an (“enchanted”) world of reasons, and not merely
of natural laws.
Hegel’s chapter in the Phenomenology on “Self-consciousness,” of which
McDowell brings out important features, is an earlier elaboration of this same
solution, which Hegel thinks he has already arrived at in principle in the previous
chapter of the Phenomenology with his conception of infinity.

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McDowell and Hegel: The upshot
Now the main thing that I want to say about the relationship between Hegel and
McDowell that’s emerging from this bit of textual commentary, is that McDowell
is hampered in his agenda by his not following Hegel more closely. McDowell is
hampered by the fact that he doesn’t bring out, as Hegel does, the way in which
a self that deserves the name because it’s self-determining emerges through the
“identity crisis” that we often experience between the higher activities of reason
and the lower satisfactions of our “animal nature.” As was the case with Whitehead,
Wittgenstein, Murdoch, and Sellars, McDowell too leaves the drama of reason
versus appetites and mere opinions so unspoken that his readers may well never
in fact think of it as a drama. But it’s our experience of this drama that gives us
the means to solve McDowell’s problem of the relation between reason and our
animal nature. For this experience shows us precisely how reason is at work in
the being that we might otherwise be inclined to identify simply in terms of its
animal nature. This is what Hegel shows us with his conception, which McDowell
overlooks, of true infinity as the finite’s transcending itself.52
Self-determination is, in fact, a frequent topic of McDowell’s later Having
the World in View (2009), as is appropriate for a book that deals extensively with
German Idealism. But McDowell doesn’t mention how this self-determination
brings something into being that’s more itself than what’s not self-determining. In
his response to Robert Pippin’s reading of Hegel, McDowell asserts that “we should
not be frightened away from holding that initiation into the right sort of communal
practice makes a metaphysical difference. . . . Responsiveness to reasons . . . marks
out a fully-fledged human individual as no longer a merely biological particular,
but a being of a metaphysically new kind” (p. 172). But I don’t find in McDowell
any spelled-out account of how this metaphysically new kind of being relates to the
other, merely biological kind of being. That the former has a “foothold” in the latter
is only a hint. How is it that the world contains two fundamentally different kinds of
being? How is it that what looks in many respects like many “nonrational” animals
is in fact a metaphysically new kind of being? How did it become a “normal” part of
this being’s “coming to maturity” that it is initiated into a space of reasons? Why, in
fact, does reason arise and distinguish itself from “animal nature”?
Plato and Hegel answer these questions by locating the two kinds of being within
the single process of the emergence of the one from the other. We experience this
process constantly in our efforts to be self-determining, which we understand as
aiming at the goal of our being a real self. The ultimate explanation, then, is that
what is more real, by being self-determining, must supersede what is less real.
Though our understanding of what it would take for us to be truly real is often
limited, none of us wants to be anything less than that.
Why should we regard what is self-determining as more real than what is not
self-determining? What is self-determining is real as itself, or an sich as Hegel

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    59

puts it in the Science of Logic, rather than “for others” (Seinfüranderes); and what
is real as itself clearly has a kind of reality that other beings don’t have. Hegel dubs
this reality simply “reality” [Realität] (in contrast to “being,” “being-for-others,”
and so forth). His thought, which he lays out at length in the first two chapters
of the Science of Logic, is simply that what is fully “itself ” is in a way that what
is partly through others is not. Which, I suggest, we can all confirm through the
experience that we have of being more fully ourselves at some times than at others.
We know what it’s like to be real “as ourselves,” and not merely as a product of our
environment, and given the choice, we prefer the former. We want to really be
ourselves. (Though in various kinds of despair, we certainly can sometimes feel
that we have no choice about the matter.)
Hegel’s philosophical system elaborates everywhere on this notion of becoming
fully real or real as oneself. His themes of “sublation” (Aufhebung, literally, “lifting
up”), “reality,” “infinity,” “freedom,” the “Idea,” “Spirit,” “God,” and “elevation
to God” (Erhebung zu Gott) all refer in their various ways to this same nisus or
process. His fundamental conclusion in this regard is that “it is not the finite which
is the real [das Reale], but the infinite” (HSL p. 149; GW 21:136; SuW 5:164). The
finite isn’t “real” because it’s determined in part by its relation, through its limit, to
something that’s other than it, namely, to other finite things. Infinity, on the other
hand, has no “other,” and consequently can’t lose “reality” to an other. “Freedom,”
the “Idea,” “Spirit,” and “God” (whether as “absolute Idea” or as “absolute Spirit”)
each represents a successful ascent to this kind of infinity or “reality.”53
If we don’t bring out this theme of ascent in Hegel, we don’t bring out the most
obvious way in which he speaks to everyday human experience and to historical
human culture as we see it in religion, ethics, psychology, and literature. Nor do
we bring out his proposal that what connects reason and our animal nature, which
is to say, infinity and finitude or “Spirit” and “Nature,” is precisely our ongoing,
everyday experience of choosing between them and trying (sometimes) to rise
above one of them, to the other.
It connects them because, as I’ve said, this rising above, this sublation or ascent,
in Hegel, is always a self-transcendence, a preservation as well as a cancellation, a
true infinity, which is why it can be the familiar experience (“trying to rise above”)
that it is. This is how Hegel avoids the philosophical “abstractions” that create an
apparent metaphysical and epistemological problem (as opposed to a familiar
moral challenge) about the relation between reason and our animal nature. The
fuller, because self-determining reality that is the rational self is “in” the less
real, because not self-determining “animal nature” because it is the latter’s self-
transcendence. This is Hegel’s solution to the metaphysical problem. And as for the
epistemological problem, since the rational self ’s concepts are ways in which the
material “animals” that we are transcend our mere (non-spontaneous and finite)
materiality and constitute something that’s spontaneous and infinite, they are ways
in which these material animals function “in” the material world, and thus they

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must apply to non-spontaneous and finite materiality, if only by identifying the
way in which that materiality transcends itself.
Thus the notion of ascent to infinity, and the associated notions of the Concept
and Spirit, as Hegel elaborates them, are crucially important for the issues that
McDowell is addressing. Indeed, the Platonic tradition which Hegel is following
here, and which McDowell and others don’t draw on as much as Hegel does, has
resources that are indispensable for addressing these issues.

Sebastian Rödl on “self-consciousness”

and nature
In a series of recent books, Sebastian Rödl has presented what is, to the best of my
knowledge, the most articulate and coherent recent account of the higher reality
of “self-consciousness,” and thus of what Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel are all
driving at. Rödl shows in convincing detail how fundamental concepts shared by
(especially) Aristotle and Hegel resolve central present-day debates that are often
conducted without reference to these concepts. I will pick out a few especially
significant pieces of Rödl’s evolving oeuvre.
Rödl’s second book in English, Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into
the Forms of the Finite Intellect (“CT,” 2012), offers an improved version of
Kant’s alternative to empiricism.54 Rödl’s thesis, according to the dust jacket, is
that “the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are
aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another.”
He demonstrates this by showing how empiricism, which accepts only the
temporal as real, makes the temporal unintelligible (CT pp. 12–15), whereas the
(atemporal) “categories of ” the temporal—substance, state, movement form,
substance form, subject form—constitute, together with the temporal and the
sensible, an intelligible totality. This is similar to Hegel’s “true infinity” (and to
Hegel’s Encyclopedia as a whole, which gets its structure from true infinity), in
which the merely finite or temporal is, as such, unreal, but it can “transcend
itself ” through the infinite (the atemporal categories of Hegel’s Logic) and thus
constitute something real.
Species of Rödl’s general “substance form” are “phusis” (nature) and “psyche”
(life, soul) (CT p. 11), of which reason and knowledge are an actualization
(“energeia”) (CT p. 207). We learn about reason and knowledge in Rödl’s Self-
Consciousness (“SC,” 2007) and Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction
to Absolute Idealism (“SCO,” 2018), which deal with the “power of knowledge” or
of “judgment.” “The science of man, of which the theory of knowledge forms a
part, is not an empirical science. It is pursued not by observing men and drawing
inferences from these data but by articulating what we know of man by being men”

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    61

(SC p.164, emphasis added). That is, it proceeds, like Plato’s Phaedo (98b-99c) and
like Kant, from first-person experience, the “I think.”
Rödl begins by arguing that an “I think” needs to be guided by a normative order,
and not merely by occurrent desires, because desires come and go, while an “I”
unifies temporal stages in extended intentional projects. So an “I” must be guided
not by occurrent desires but by what Rödl calls “infinite ends,” such as health (SC
p. 38). Unlike occurrent desires, infinite ends aren’t indexed to the individual at a
particular point in time. An imperative, which expresses an infinite end, “brings its
object under a normative order, representing it as bound to, yet liable to fall from,
this order” (SC p. 66). This is the fundamental Platonic vertical axis on which I
harp in this book: we are “bound to, yet liable to fall from” higher ideals or norms,
constantly faced with the choice of whether or not to be guided by them.
“Action,” then, is a temporally integrated process that is in fact guided by a
normative (higher) order of infinite ends. Regarding such action, Rödl comments
that

it has been held that, since its essential normativity cannot be accommodated
within the natural sciences, we might be forced to throw the concept of action
and with it action concepts on the trash heap of outdated theories. [But . . .]
Renouncing action concepts is a form of self-annihilation: logical self-
annihilation. It annihilates the power to think and say “I.” (SC p. 63)

To which one might add that insofar as we aim to make up our own minds about
what to do and believe, the notion of the “self ” and the “I” is not one that we can
do without.55
As to the relation between action and other sorts of events in the world, Rödl
writes,

An action concept . . . signifies the principle of temporal unity of its instances.

. . . Even if one could apprehend all the phases of someone’s making breakfast
without employing action concepts, one would not thereby apprehend her
making breakfast.. . . It is impossible to isolate what happens when someone
is acting intentionally from the mind of the acting subject. (SC pp. 51–55;
emphasis added)

This last sentence is the fundamental thesis of Plato/Hegel “idealism,” first stated
in Plato’s Phaedo (98b-99c) or perhaps in Parmenides’s fragment 3 (to gar auto
noein estin te kai einai [“for the same thing can be thought as can be”]). Much
of reality can’t be identified as such without reference to what is going on in the
minds of acting subjects; and the reality that has this character is (as I put it)
“higher” in that, as Rödl says, we are “bound to, yet liable to fall from” the rational
order through which this reality says “I.”

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 Parallel to this account of action and action explanation, Rödl presents an
account of belief and belief explanation:

Belief, or theoretical thought, is a reality that includes its subject’s knowledge

of it, which knowledge therefore is unmediated first-person knowledge.
For, beliefs essentially figure in belief explanations, and it defines this form
of explanation that, if a belief can be explained in this way, its subject is in a
position thus to explain it. Her knowledge that and why she believes what she
does, which she expresses in giving the explanation, is not a separate existence
from what it represents. (SC p. 100)

That is, as the action of making breakfast depends upon the maker’s intention to
make breakfast, the existence of a belief depends upon the believer’s knowledge of
it. The intention and the making are not separate realities, nor are the belief and
the believer’s knowledge of it. Because these are not separate realities, the maker
and the believer have direct knowledge of their making and belief, respectively.
But as Rödl goes on to show, this reality of action and belief of which we have
direct knowledge is also a “material” reality, inasmuch as we predicate of ourselves
changes of state and movements, and these require “a principle of temporal unity
of [their] object,” which will be a material substance concept such as “man” (SC
p. 130). So Rödl’s “idealism” doesn’t reject the notion of material substance. As he
says, “Our account of ‘I’ yields a metaphysics that is as idealist as it is materialist”
(SC p. 15). The only thing that Rödl’s account rejects is the empiricist notion that
the only source of knowledge is passive receptivity. Rather, we have first-person
knowledge of our actions and beliefs, and thus of the reality that they constitute,
from their non-receptive, rational “spontaneity.”
But while Rödl’s view combines rational spontaneity and material substances, it’s
not (in this respect, at least) a dualism. Since we material substances possess this
spontaneity, and first-person knowledge of it, it’s clear that spontaneity and first-
person knowledge are not a domain that’s separate from the material world, but
rather something like what Hegel calls the finite’s or nature’s (the material world’s)
transcending itself56—transcending, in that their action constitutes something that
knows itself, and thus has a self, in a way that finite things and nature as such do not.

Rödl’s Hegelian “Self-Constitution” and

Hegel’s “Absolute Idea”
In a recent essay entitled “The Science of Logic as the Self-Constitution of the
Power of Knowledge” (2017), Rödl draws a detailed parallel between his account of
knowers as rationally spontaneous material substances and Hegel’s derivation, in

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    63

the Science of Logic, of teleology, life, and knowledge from mechanism. What Rödl
unfolds here, following Hegel, subsumes and thus illuminates Rödl’s accounts in
SC of action as causation, of material substance’s spontaneity, and of the power of
knowledge. The process that Hegel and Rödl present is “self-constituting” because
it is the emergence of an integrated self from, and through, previously disparate
multiplicities. Which indeed is what we saw earlier in true infinity, in which the
infinite surpasses the finite’s unreality or lack of selfhood through the finite’s
going beyond its finitude into self-determination. The sequence from mechanical
causation to the power of knowledge, which Hegel unfolds and which Rödl partly
unfolds, is an elaborate true infinity.
I say that Rödl partly unfolds this sequence because Rödl’s version, in this paper
and his other publications up to the present, lacks one important feature that makes
Hegel’s version, unlike Rödl’s, an actual infinity. This is a problem that I haven’t
posed for any of the preceding more or less Hegelian thinkers, because none of
them come close enough to Hegel’s full accomplishment to make it appropriate to
raise this issue.
In Hegel’s exposition, knowledge (or “cognition”: Erkennen) is divided into
theoretical and practical, the Idea of the True and the Idea of the Good, and these
are integrated as the Absolute Idea; whereas in Rödl’s version, the unfolding stops
at knowledge as such. And Hegel’s division and integration of theoretical and
practical is not at all accidental, because it’s anticipated by and completes the prior
development of the entire Logic from Being to the Subject. One can see in that
development how subjectivity and knowledge necessarily have theoretical and
practical, “fact,” and “value” aspects. This is the case because when subjectivity
first emerges in the Logic’s Doctrine of Being (“only the beginning of the Subject,”
as Hegel puts it [HSL p. 115; GW 21:103; SuW 5:123]), it is in connection with
the issue of how being can be determinate, whether “in itself ” (an sich) or only
through its relation to others (Sein-für-anderes). There is no distinction here
between fact and value, knowledge and action; the whole issue is how something
can be “itself ” at all. But the attentive reader will realize that being “oneself ” is
already implicitly the issue of self-determination and inner freedom,57 which is
what Hegel means by “Subject” and what he finally unfolds explicitly in the Logic’s
culminating “Subjective Logic.”
Because a Subject is incomplete without an Object, the Subjective Logic takes
the forms successively of Subjectivity and Objectivity. And then the issues of
theoretical cognition (the Subject’s knowledge of Objects) and practical cognition
(the Subject’s influence on Objects), or “fact” and “value,” are already implicitly
present. Hegel develops Objectivity first (and this is where Rödl’s narrative begins)
as Mechanism, which however fails to render anything “itself.” But to be fully real,
an Object must be fully itself. This, as Rödl points out, is why Hegel proceeds from
Mechanism to Teleology. Teleology then fails in a similar way, and gives way to
Life, as another candidate for “itself ”-ness; and Life similarly has to give way to

64   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

Cognition (Erkennen, which Rödl represents as “knowledge”). Rödl’s treatment of
this sequence is valuable. But as I say, he does not go on, as Hegel does, to divide
Cognition into the “Idea of the True” and the “Idea of the Good.” Hegel carries out
this division in order to reflect the issues of Subject versus Object, theory versus
practice, and fact versus value, which as we just saw (but Rödl does not note) are
inherent in Subject-hood as such.
And then, as I said, Hegel finally integrates the Idea of the True and the Idea
of the Good as the “Absolute Idea,” as he must do in order for Cognition to enable
Being to be fully “itself.” If, as occurs in Kant and in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the true
and the good, theory and practice, and fact and value were left facing each other,
with their relationship to each other unclear, we wouldn’t have achieved anything
that’s fully clarified or (therefore) anything that’s fully itself. But Hegel’s point is that
when we understand that the agenda of the entire exercise, that is, of his Logic as a
whole, has been to find a version of Being that is in fact fully itself, by being fully self-
determining, then we can see these aspects, the pursuit of the true and the pursuit of
the good, as both serving that goal. This is because, as I’ve explained, pursuing ideals
like truth and goodness makes us, ourselves, self-determining, and fully ourselves, as
a puppet of externally induced opinions and appetites cannot be; and if we are thus
self-determining, reality in general is self-determining, through us.
And when in this way we see the pursuit of the true and the pursuit of the good
as both serving the goal of self-determination (in opposite directions, as it were),
then their relationship to each other is indeed fully clear, and we do have before us a
true infinity, a fully self-determining whole. Inasmuch as it’s fully self-determining
and thus fully “itself,” this whole deserves the title of “reality” more than anything
else does. Neither Subject nor Object (if the two are understood as opposed to each
other) and neither fact nor value alone is self-determining or real in this sense.
In contrast to what I’ve just described in Hegel’s Logic, Rödl’s work does not yet
integrate theory and practice, fact and value, in any explicit fashion, and thus it
doesn’t present a fully self-determining whole, a “reality” in Hegel’s sense. Instead,
Rödl’s work leaves us with a residual unclarified dualism of theory versus practice,
fact versus value. Nevertheless, through his accounts of the unfolding of selfhood
from mechanical causation through knowledge, and thus of rational spontaneity
as something that’s accomplished by the material substances that we call human
beings, Rödl does integrate the “humanistic” and the “scientific” conceptions of
reality more systematically than Wittgenstein, Murdoch, Sellars, or McDowell
have been able to.

And the poets

While philosophers try to clarify various aspects of the nexus of rational self-
government, love, ethics, science, the arts, reality, and God, literary artists conjure

“THAT WHICH SHOWS GOD IN ME, FORTIFIES ME”    65

up the nexus itself with images. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley
Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Mary
Oliver, and others celebrate the incomparable experience of something free and
transcendent in themselves and in the world:

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in
the glass. . . .
I ascend from the moon.. . . I ascend from the night,
And perceive of the ghastly glimmer the sunbeams reflected,
And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great
or small. . . .
There is that in me . . . . I do not know what it is. . . .
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death. . . . It is form and union and plan. . . . it
is eternal life.. . . it is happiness.
(WALT WHITMAN)58

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3 FREEDOM AND FULL
REALITY

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is,
because man is disunited with himself.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, NATURE, CHAPTER VIII

What does “God” have to do with

“freedom”?
The idea that knowledge of God can be based on our experience of freedom and
love may sound a bit strange. Much of what we hear about “God” connects God
not with freedom but with an external authority that tells us what we should
believe and do.
For example, the “militant” spirituality of Muslim and Christian fundamentalists
shows little interest in listening to its opponents’ thoughts or arguments. So it
suggests that far from supporting the idea of “God,” really free inquiry would
probably undermine it. The long history of religious dogmatism and intolerance
only seems to confirm that “God” and free inquiry don’t mix well. Orthodox
Christianity has consigned its opponents not only to hellfire but also sometimes
to earthly fire. The emperor Constantine, the prophet Muhammad’s wars, the
medieval Crusades, and the seventeenth century’s wars of religion in Europe all
allied religion to political domination. Nowadays, religious pressure causes the
effective exclusion of the serious teaching of modern biology from many public
and private schools in the United States.
This history obviously also makes one wonder what the idea of “God” really
has to do with love. The dogmatic programs that I’m referring to clearly aren’t
motivated by love of human beings in general. Prominent promoters of these
programs often seem to be more interested in power than in love. These promoters
often associate adherents of other views with “Evil,” a force that’s absolutely
opposed to the “Good” that they believe themselves to represent.
What in the idea of “God” encourages “Crusades” and “holy wars”? Why do
people who take themselves to be “believers in God” slaughter people whom they
regard as “unbelievers”? Could it be, as many “humanists” suspect, that the best
defense against such behavior would be simply to reject the idea of God altogether,
and thus rid ourselves of one of the main issues that puts us at each other’s throats?
In this connection, one can’t help noting that each of the major monotheistic
religions starts out from the assumption that certain actions or beliefs can
simply be prescribed. They are “dogma,” the church’s “teaching” and the
prescribed contents of “faith” or right living, “orthodoxy” which we’re expected
just to accept if we want to be on the right side of God. It’s easy to imagine that
when people are raised in a tradition whose basic commitments are put beyond
question, they might be more inclined to dismiss other traditions’ beliefs
outright, and to adopt the “militant” stance according to which only they have
access to the truth.1

Would a “God”-oriented human being

even be responsible for her actions?
If these problems weren’t difficult enough, thinking about dogmatism can also
provoke a more general question. If “God” is a supreme authority that, in the
last resort, tells us what to believe and what to do, doesn’t this “God” override
our ordinary human freedom of thought and action? If God really overrides
our freedom in this way, how can we be fully responsible for our actions? If the
ultimate standard by which our actions will be judged is simply imposed on us
by an external authority, shouldn’t that authority, rather than we, be responsible
for our actions? These are some of the most important objections that modern
atheism raises against theology.
If someone replies that God made us free and responsible, one has to ask, how
can one agent who has great power and makes all the rules “make” another agent
who has by comparison miniscule power truly “responsible”? As Immanuel Kant
said in a lecture in the 1770s, “But if I assume: it [the soul] is a being derived from
another, then it appears to be quite probable that it is also determined by this cause
in all its thoughts and actions.”2
But if God didn’t override our freedom in these ways, would God even “make
a difference”?
So the problem is, How can there be a real God, a God who “makes a difference,”
who doesn’t effectively eliminate human freedom and responsibility?

68   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

Why “God” at all?
In response to these problems, I propose to show that successful human life can’t
rely simply on humans as such, with whatever desires and attitudes they happen to
have. Successful human life requires us to go beyond these things, beyond “nature,”
to something that can appropriately be called “God.” But when we understand
this God, we’ll see why these issues about the compatibility of God with human
responsibility don’t actually arise.
As I’ve said, I find the argument for these conclusions mainly in Plato and in
Hegel. Plato presents it in highly suggestive fragments, in his Republic and other
writings. Emerson’s remarks about God or the “Over-Soul,” published in the
1840s, are based on these suggestions of Plato’s together with Plotinus’s and other
writers’ elaborations on them. Hegel brings Plato’s suggestions (in many cases
mediated through intervening thinkers including Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant)
together into a single systematic presentation, in his Science of Logic (1812–14)
and his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817–30). Emerson didn’t have
access to Hegel’s works until his own period of greatest creativity was past. When
he did read some Hegel in English translation, his response was enthusiastic. As
for Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Michael Polanyi, and Iris Murdoch, they construct
versions of Platonic thinking which, as a result of intervening misunderstandings
of Hegel, do not have the benefit of his work.

G. W. F. Hegel
The first thing I need to say about Hegel is that whatever you may think you
know about him probably has very little to do with what I value in him. His name
carries many negative or unhelpful associations for people. But I feel that justice
requires me to give Hegel credit for what he has taught me, both about God and
freedom themselves and about how to understand Plato, Emerson, and (indeed)
Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Murdoch, and many other thinkers.
If you just want to know what I think I’ve learned from Plato and Hegel, you
can skip ahead several sections. But if you’d like a brief introduction to Hegel, the
controversial historical figure, here it is.
Like many members of his generation, Hegel was inspired by Immanuel Kant,
in the generation before him. Kant’s central idea is that we humans are capable
of a kind of rational self-government, in what we believe and in what we do,
that distinguishes us from what is merely mechanical. Hegel embraced this idea
wholeheartedly, but he wanted to do a better job than Kant had done of explaining
how our rational self-government relates to nature and what is merely mechanical,
how ethics relates to science, and how ethics and science relate to religion.3
(Which are of course the same issues that I explored in post-Hegelian thinkers in

FREEDOM AND FULL REALITY    69

the previous chapter.) Hegel lectured regularly on the philosophy of religion, and
all of his lectures and his books use religious language freely, if not always in the
most conventional ways.
In his lectures, Hegel gave special attention to philosophy’s history and to
the history of political, social, and intellectual freedom. More than any of his
predecessors, he made an explicit effort to appropriate and make sense of the
entire tradition of Western philosophical thought, up to his time.
Unfortunately, the feature of Hegel’s philosophy that is best known to many
readers is his unusual pattern of thought which commentators often call his
“dialectical method.” This is a feature of Hegel’s philosophy that the self-proclaimed
atheist, Karl Marx, regarded as valuable and claimed to have applied in his own
political philosophy. As a student, Marx attended university lectures given by
followers of Hegel in Berlin. Years later, in a famous Afterword to his Das Kapital
(1873), Marx wrote that because Hegel was an “idealist,” his dialectic was standing
“on its head.” So, Marx says, Marx turned it “right side up again,” so as to “discover
the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”4 Because of these claims that Marx
made, many readers suppose that there is an important continuity between
Hegel and Marx. This leads many people who sympathize with Marxism to have
qualified sympathy for Hegel, and it has led many people who reject Marxism to
reject Hegel as well.
Beyond what I have said, there is very little agreement about the best way to
describe Hegel’s thinking or his relation to later thinkers including Marx. Trying
to explain what Hegel’s “dialectic” is, encyclopedia articles quickly get bogged
down in issues of terminology and give their readers very little idea of what the
real point of the exercise is supposed to be.
In the social and political realm, in addition to Marx, fascist thinkers such as
Giovanni Gentile in Italy and Ivan Ilyin in Russia claimed to be influenced by
Hegel. And between the Marxist and fascist extremes, broadly “social liberal”
writers such as Bernard Bosanquet in England drew on Hegel. So the social
and political implications of Hegel’s thought have been and continue to be
controversial.
In the realm of metaphysics and religion, likewise, there is little agreement about
what it is that Hegel thinks he emerges with from his extensive study of Western
thought. Followers of Marx, and other atheists or humanists, often praise Hegel
for his apparently critical attitude toward traditional religion. Other scholars take
seriously Hegel’s repeated statements that he is a Lutheran Christian and his use of
apparently theological or mystical terminology, such as “Spirit” (Geist). Here is a
golden statement from his Science of Logic:

The universal is therefore free power; . . . it could also be called free love and
boundless blessedness, for it bears itself towards what is different from it as
towards its own self.5

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There is no dogma here: no appeal to the authority of a sacred book or prophet. But
why does Hegel use such redolent words as “love” and “blessedness” (Seligkeit), if
not to signal a fundamental sympathy for the theological discourse in which such
words are at home?
Hegel does indeed criticize conventional religion. What he criticizes is the
conventional conception of God as outside us, which (he points out) makes God
limited, by being separate from the world and from us, and thus bounded by and
partially determined by his relation to the world and us. As I have pointed out, Hegel
didn’t invent the idea of the “God within us.” It is suggested by well-known passages
in scripture and canonical early Christian writings, and it is influential in Christian,
Muslim, Jewish, and Neoplatonic mysticism and in Vedanta. So Hegel is not an
essentially atheistic thinker, as is often suggested, unless canonical Christianity
and Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Neoplatonic mysticism and Vedanta are also
atheistic. Which would come as quite a surprise to the people who embrace them.
Writers for whom religion is not a major concern have trouble imagining how
it could be a major concern for Hegel. When Robert Pippin refers to Hegel’s use
of theological language as “metaphorical” (Pippin [2018], p. 278 n. 9), he doesn’t
specify what a contrasting, literal use of theological language would entail. It’s
not obvious, to me at least, that the metaphysical language that Pippin quotes
from Hegel (that “the exposition of the pure concept” is “the absolute divine
concept itself,” and “the logical course of God’s self-determination as being”) is
incompatible with the theology of, for example, St Athanasius or St Augustine.
And when Pippin refers in Blaise Pascal’s phrase to Hegel’s God as a “God of the
philosophers” (Pippin [2018], p. 134 n. 72) and implies that such a God can’t also
be the God of religion, he assumes what he needs to demonstrate.

Hegel versus Feuerbach’s

“anthropotheism”
To further clarify Hegel’s relation to religion it is useful to contrast him with
an influential early critic of Hegel who had initially been a follower: Ludwig
Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a doctrine of “anthropotheism,” according to
which humans as such literally are God. In The Essence of Christianity (1841),
Feuerbach maintained that “man was already in God, was already God himself,
before God became man” (as Jesus).6 Feuerbach explained the apparent difference
between God and man by his notion of God as a projection of what is actually
entirely human: “Is not the love of God to man . . . the love of man to himself made
an object . . .?”7
In 1842, Feuerbach identified religion and God with “emotion, feeling,
heart, and love,” explicitly contrasting this view with what he took to be Hegel’s

FREEDOM AND FULL REALITY    71

preoccupation with the intellect. “The heart,” Feuerbach wrote, “denies the
difference between God and man, but [traditional and Hegelian] theology affirms
it.”8 “The Hegelian philosophy is the last refuge and the last rational mainstay of
theology.”9 And Feuerbach went on in his Preface to the second edition of The
Essence of Christianity (1843) to assert that “I base my thoughts on materials that
are given to us only through the activity of the senses. . . . In the field of theoretical
philosophy, I subscribe—in direct contrast to the philosophy of Hegel, which holds
exactly the opposite view—to realism or materialism in the mentioned sense.”10
Feuerbach was right: Hegel does agree with traditional theology in seeing a
difference between God and man. Feuerbach didn’t note that there needs to be a
difference between God and man, if God is to deserve authority, awe, and worship.
Humans merely as such, no matter how much “heart” we may have, don’t deserve
authority, awe, or worship. What deserves those things is something that’s in some
important respect higher than humans as such—and likewise higher than the
inputs of the senses, as such. In his hurry to replace the “old” philosophy with
his “new” philosophy, Feuerbach neglected the entire point of the Plato/Hegel
tradition, that what’s rational has an authority that humans and the deliverances of
their senses, as such, do not have.
Feuerbach wanted to close the gap between God and humans which results
from the conventional conception of God as a separate being from humans. He
may have had an inkling that, as Hegel points out, this gap makes God finite. But
Feuerbach didn’t notice that Plato and Hegel, together with many early Christian
writers, had already closed the gap by rejecting the conventional conception of
God—but without making God finite by eliminating all difference between the
merely human, which is certainly finite, and the divine. This is the point of Hegel’s
notion of God as a “true infinity,” in which the finite truly goes beyond itself but
without being a being that’s separate from the finite; and it’s the point of Plato’s
conception of the divine as within us, as intellect, as well as beyond us. Plato and
Hegel preserve the point of religion, that there is something that’s genuinely higher
than humans merely as such, without projecting what’s higher as a separate being.
Despite Feuerbach’s early enthusiasm (prior to the texts that I’ve quoted) for
Hegel, Feuerbach unfortunately wasn’t able to comprehend what Plato and Hegel
were proposing. His failure to grasp this is manifest in the dualistic, either-or
contrast that he frequently draws, in his later, anti-Hegelian writings, between his
own “materialism” and Kant’s and Hegel’s “spiritualism.” Because he can’t conceive
of a nondualistic way of expressing the claims that are made in what he calls
“spiritualism,” he rejects it and opts for its supposed opposite, “materialism” and
“nature.”11 I explained Plato’s and Hegel’s nondualistic notions of “transcendence”
and “spirit” in the previous chapter, and I’ll explore them further in this and
subsequent chapters.
Feuerbach’s final mistake is his suggestion that Hegel focuses on the intellect
as opposed to the heart. Like Plato, Hegel thinks that heart and intellect are

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intimately connected, especially at higher levels of human (or, as we might also call
it, “superhuman”) functioning. And it’s this distinction between lower and higher
levels of functioning, which Plato and Hegel insist on, that preserves a difference
between humans, merely as such, and God.

Hegel versus Marx

Finally we can consider Karl Marx’s claim to have put Hegel’s “dialectic” “right side
up again.” Hegel’s Science of Logic, which lays the foundation of his philosophical
system and explains his “dialectic,” is so difficult to read that few commentators
discuss it in detail. Marx himself never wrote about it in any detail, and it seems
to me that if he read it, he failed to understand its central argument. For, as I have
shown in three long chapters of my book on Hegel, his Science of Logic makes it
clear that his “dialectic” can’t be separated from his philosophical theology.
Beginning with the Science of Logic, Hegel’s entire system unfolds the
consequences of the fact that some beings seek to be guided by something that’s
higher than their animal urges and socially ingrained thoughts. His dialectic is a
way of articulating those consequences.12 If “the ideal” were merely, as Marx says,
“the material world reflected by the human mind,”13 then Hegel’s dialectic would
have no function, because there would be no higher authority and no higher reality
than the material world. Since Hegel’s dialectic is tied up with his “idealism” in this
way, Marx’s claim to have preserved the “rational kernel” of Hegel’s dialectic while
putting it “right side up again” with his own atheistic materialism, can’t be true.
Also, when Marx contrasts the “rational kernel” of Hegel’s thinking with its
“mystical shell,” he assumes that reason and mysticism are necessarily in conflict
with one another. But Plato and his followers including Hegel think they have good
reasons to disagree with Marx about this. Of course they understand “mysticism”
not as praising unreason or mystery as such but rather as describing how we know
God directly, through our experience of freedom and love. It’s the doctrine of the
“God within us,” which Plato and Hegel claim is fully rational, regardless of the
fact that it doesn’t coincide with conventional “common sense.”14
So apart from the concern that Hegel shares with Marx about the unfortunate
side effects of modern industrial capitalism, Hegel’s thinking is very different
from Marx’s. Despite Marx’s manifest humanitarian passion, Marx implements
his reduction of the “ideal” to the “material world” by giving no more systematic
attention to ethics than to theology. In fact, he sometimes describes morality as
mere “bourgeois ideology.” As a result, people who claim to be Marx’s followers
and who are morally ruthless have been able to cite his own texts in support of
ignoring moral considerations. The historical consequences of this attitude of
Marx’s, in places like twentieth-century Russia and China, show how disastrous it
can be to live without an acknowledged and self-critical “idealism.”

FREEDOM AND FULL REALITY    73

 There is a recurring pattern of more or less millenarian impatience that thinks
it can dispense with moral quibbles regarding the process by which the imminent
golden age will be brought about.15 A similar pattern seems to be operative in
people’s willingness to submit without question to the supposed authority of guru
figures, or of fascist leaders. The new world that is being born or the “greatness”
that needs to be regained are thought to be so incommensurable with the existing
world that the transition to them can only be “by any means necessary.” It’s easy
to see how a dualism in which white is nowhere to be found in the present black
or is only to be found in a miraculously segregated, perhaps “divinely sanctioned”
individual or group, can easily lead to totalitarianism or terrorism.
Hegel opposes this pattern by insisting that if the “new world” or the regained
“greatness” are supposed to embody freedom, they cannot be diametrically
opposed to the existing world, because whatever is opposed to something else
is not self-determining and thus is not free. So anyone who is looking for full
freedom must look for it in the existing world as well as in the future and in
the past.

Hegel, history, and the “Idea”

Because Hegel looks for freedom everywhere, his interest in history is very different
from Marx’s interest in history (as well as from fascist notions of past and potential
“greatness”). Marx claims to have identified laws of development in history which
enable him to predict the advent of true freedom in the future. Hegel makes no
such claim. History, for Hegel, is not the unfolding of truth. Rather, it’s only to
the extent that history exhibits rational progress (in, for example, the Christian
doctrine that all humans are made in the image of God, or in the legal abolition of
slavery) that it qualifies as an aspect of Spirit. Apart from its doing that, history is
just as full of random accidents as nature is.
This is the light in which we must see Hegel’s well-known descriptions of
history as progressing from East to West, from Asian theocracies to Greek
“beautiful freedom,” Roman submission to universal law, and Muslim/Christian
“spirituality and spiritual reconciliation.”16 Hegel likes to tell stories like this one,
in which major historical phenomena appear to form a necessary progression.
“World history has an absolute East,” he says, because it has “a definite eastern
extremity, i.e. Asia.”17 But the supposed “absolute” that he refers to here is actually
a throw-away: it reflects no systematic development, and thus it has nothing in
common with his development of the “Absolute Idea” in the Science of Logic or of
“Absolute Spirit” in the Encyclopedia. These latter developments, which compose
Hegel’s systematic thought, aren’t stories. They don’t trace a sequence of events
in time or across the face of the globe. And they have a necessity that stories of
events in time or across the face of the globe can’t have and that Hegel doesn’t

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impute to such stories in the way that he imputes necessity to his systematic
writings.
Because Hegel’s treatments of history don’t describe a necessary pattern of temporal
development, they say nothing about what we can or should expect to happen in
any particular stretch of time. As a result, future-oriented thinkers are disappointed
by Hegel. They should realize that the reason for his almost complete silence about
the future is that his philosophy, as distinct from his occasional storytelling, deals
with a timeless reason, to which temporal development is irrelevant. This makes
it particularly inappropriate for future-oriented thinkers to claim that they are
redeploying or reformulating key features of Hegel’s thinking, such as his “dialectic.”
His dialectic has nothing to do with temporal development or prediction.
This also makes it quite inappropriate to cite historical disasters like the
Holocaust as somehow invalidating Hegel’s thinking. Hegel said nothing about
inevitable processes in time, so what happens in any given time period is irrelevant
to his analysis. The progress that Hegel describes is necessary and significant only
insofar as it reflects the necessity of the Idea, which is beyond time and guarantees
nothing within time.
When Hegel famously writes that “philosophy teaches us that . . . God’s will
must always prevail in the end, and that world history is nothing but the plan of
providence,” and that philosophy “transfigures reality with all its apparent injustices
and reconciles it with the rational [or] the divine Idea,”18 we have to ask what this “in
the end” and this “Idea” are. Hegel’s full explanation of the “Idea” is in his Science of
Logic, and there it is clear that the “Idea” as such is timeless. Time and space enter in
only as aspects of nature, which is subsequent to the Logic. And the consummation
of “Spirit,” and thus of human experience, is not found in the state or in history, but
in Absolute Spirit, which is composed of the arts, religion, and philosophy, and in
which Nature and Spirit return to the Idea (Encyclopedia §574) and thus go beyond
time and space. So the “in the end” and the “reconciliation” that Hegel speaks of are
not to be found in history as such, the sequence of events in time.19
Karl Löwith described Hegel’s philosophy of history as a “secularization of the
Christian faith . . . degrading sacred history to the level of secular history and exalting
the latter to the level of the first” (Löwith [1949], pp. 57 and 59). And he added
that “Hegel displaces the Christian expectation of the end of the world of time into
the course of the world process, and the absolute of faith into the rational realm of
history” (Löwith [1967], p. 33). Löwith neglected both Hegel’s Logic, with its evidently
orthodox conception of God or the Idea as timeless, and the way in which Hegel’s
Encyclopedia account of Spirit relates time, space, and history back to the timeless
Idea. So that history is in fact a part not of “Absolute Spirit” but merely of “objective
Spirit,” all of which is prior to art, religion, philosophy, and the reality (God or the
Idea, again) that they constitute, which is ultimately timeless and thus hardly “secular.”
As for Löwith’s contrast of reason versus “the absolute of faith,” my discussion
(inspired by Plato and Hegel) of faith in Chapter 1 has shown how faith can

FREEDOM AND FULL REALITY    75

play a central role in our experience without being dualistically contrasted with
“reason.” Löwith’s dualistic contrasts of sacred versus secular and faith versus
reason eliminate the freedom, and the truly higher reality composed of it, which
are Hegel’s central concern.
In his Hegel Handbuch (2003), Walter Jaeschke regrets that Hegel “touches on
the connection between Spirit and history, but neglects to work this connection
out systematically in the form that his philosophy makes possible and suggests:
Everything spiritual must be thought as historical” (p. 352; my translation).
Jaeschke regrets that while Hegel discusses the histories of art, religion, and
philosophy, individually, he doesn’t focus on the history of Absolute Spirit, as
such (same page). But Jaeschke fails to consider how by returning to the Idea,
Absolute Spirit goes beyond time, and thus also beyond history. It must do so in
order to be “absolute,” that is, fully free. So Hegel has a good reason not to hold that
“everything spiritual must be thought as historical.”
“World history” exhibits a “providence,” as Hegel says it does, only insofar as
world history shows us phenomena whose significance goes beyond time. So when
one understands what Hegel means by the “Idea,” one can reject his claim that
world history exhibits the Idea’s providence only if one is prepared to reject the idea
that world history at some times and places realizes a significant degree of freedom.
As for the religious significance of this “providence,” all humans benefit from it
insofar as what is fully real in each of us is incorporated in it, and thus it takes us
beyond spatial and temporal divisions and beyond finitude in general. This is the
process that Hegel details, primarily, under the heading of Absolute Spirit, and not
in his discussions of history.
Hegel’s proclivity for telling dramatic stories, as in the “absolute East” (and
so forth) of world history, has misled many readers. But the main reason they
have been misled is that in his discussions of world history he always has his
metaphysical theology in mind, but he spells that theology out elsewhere, in the
Science of Logic and in “Absolute Spirit” in the Encyclopedia, where few people read
or understand it.
Besides excluding Marxist notions of predictable future liberation, Hegel
likewise excludes fascist notions of retrieving past “greatness.” Just as there is no
“golden age” in the future, so too there is no “golden age” in the past. If we are to
be free, we must examine every phenomenon, every age, and both our outer and
our inner lives, for traces both of freedom and of its absence. And full freedom, as
in Absolute Spirit, always points beyond the finitude of time.20

Hegel’s “naturalism”? (Terry Pinkard)

In line with the twentieth-century tendency to reject “metaphysics” in favor
of doctrines that seem to be more in keeping with the natural sciences, efforts

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have been made since the 1970s to present Hegel as “non-metaphysical,” and
more recently as advocating “naturalism.”21 Terry Pinkard sums up what he calls
“Hegel’s naturalism” in the following way: “We are self-conscious, self-interpreting
animals, natural creatures whose ‘nonnaturalness’ is not a metaphysical difference
(as that, say, between spiritual and physical ‘stuff ’) or the exercise of a special form
of causality.”22 For Pinkard, “naturalism” is apparently equivalent to the denial of
any non-physical stuff or “special form of causality.”
Everything then depends on what one means by denying what’s “non-physical”
or “special.” Does this mean denying that there can be such a thing as a choice to
pursue an ideal such as goodness or truth, and a higher kind of reality that is the
result of such a choice? If this is what is meant, then, in the absence of further
argument, the position seems to be dogmatic.
If, on the other hand, the rejection of what’s “non-physical” or “special” is not
to be understood as denying such choices or anything distinctive that results from
them, then this rejection appears to exclude only outright dualism: two parallel
types of “stuff ” or of causation. It wouldn’t exclude the sort of (prima facie)
“supernatural” reality that Hegel lays out when he makes it clear that although
what he calls “spirit” isn’t separate from what he calls “nature,” it’s nevertheless
certainly in some sense higher and more real than that. For example, when he tells
us that “for us, Spirit has for its presupposition, Nature, of which it is the truth,
and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth, Nature has vanished.” And “the
absolute is Spirit; this is the highest definition of the absolute” (Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences §381 and §384R). Nature has “vanished” and Spirit is “the
highest definition of the absolute” because Nature, as such, is sublated in Spirit;
Spirit, in contrast to Nature, is infinite; and “it is not the finite which is the real, but
the infinite” (HSL p. 149; GW 21:136; SuW 5:164).
The point of Hegel’s doctrines of sublation/Aufhebung, of the “infinite,” and
of “Spirit,” is precisely that some aspects of the world are higher and more real
than others in the sense that they’re more self-determining and therefore more
themselves (as I like to put it) and more “real” (as Hegel himself puts it) and more
authoritative (“absolute”)—even though, in accordance with the principles of
sublation and true infinity, these aspects of the world don’t exist separately from
its less self-determining aspects. Pinkard overlooks all of these features of Hegel’s
definitive expositions of the relation between Nature and Spirit, and between the
finite and the infinite. Pinkard is quite right that Hegel rejects any dualism of
different kinds of “stuff ” or inexplicably “special forms of causality.” But it doesn’t
follow from this that nothing is “higher than” (nothing is “super-”) anything else.
“Higher,” in a nondualistic way, is precisely what the infinite and Spirit, according
to the above texts, are.
Aristotle says at Metaphysics 100a32-35 that “there is someone who is even
above the student of nature, [namely, he] who studies universal and primary
substance.” And he says in the Nicomachean Ethics (X.7, 1177a14-15) that “the best

FREEDOM AND FULL REALITY    77

is . . . to understand what is fine and divine, by being itself either divine or the most
divine element in us.” The “above” and the “divine” here make it clear that Aristotle
is not a programmatic “naturalist,” in the sense of rejecting higher realities. And,
as we can see from the passages that I quoted, neither is Hegel.

Hegel and Plato

Having, as I hope, put some of these often discussed issues about Hegel to rest,
let’s turn now to his relation to Plato. In a quotable passage in the penultimate
paragraph of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel said that “we can
now be Platonists no longer.” He likewise said or implied that we can no longer
be “Spinozists” or “Kantians” either, but this doesn’t make Spinoza or Kant minor
figures in Hegel’s formation. Likewise for Plato. If one contrasts Plato and Hegel with
such flatly anti-Platonic writers as Gorgias, Sextus Empiricus, Epicurus, Lucretius,
Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and their successors in modern relativism,
skepticism, materialism, empiricism, logical positivism, and deconstruction, one
will see how much Plato and Hegel have in common. Gorgias and Hume and the
others all reject the vertical dimension of reality, the divine “higher reality,” which
Plato immortalized in his Forms (or “Ideas”) and his ascent from the Cave, and
which Hegel preserves in his conceptions of sublation or “lifting up” (Aufhebung),
infinity, freedom, Spirit, “the Idea” (precisely), and “elevation to God” (Erhebung
zu Gott).
Rather than being committed to any particular prior conception of the higher
reality or the divine, what Plato and Hegel are committed to and try to clarify
is the vertical dimension, the dimension of something “higher,” as such. Lloyd
Gerson specifies the content of what he calls “Ur-Platonism” as “antimaterialism,
antimechanism, antirelativism, and antiskepticism.”23 What these all have in
common is the notion of an “ascent” to a truth or reality that’s more true or more
real than one’s starting point; that is, they have in common what I call a “vertical
dimension.” We see all of this in Hegel’s Science of Logic and Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences just as much as we see it in Plato and Plotinus.
Robert Pippin argues that concepts, for Hegel, “are supposed to be moments
in the process of thought’s attempt to determine its own possibility,” rather than
being “apprehended realities, eidetic things.” So an assimilation of Hegel to Plato
“would leave unaccounted for all [Hegel’s] references to subjectivity, the active
universal, deeds, and that brought about.”24 But what’s most important about
Plato’s Forms is not their apparent “thing”-hood, but the role that they play in
the soul’s achievement of unity, which is the primary locus of “ascent.” The Forms
make the soul’s ascent to unity possible by giving it a source of guidance that has
more authority than the pushes and pulls of appetites and prior opinions. (I take
the Sun, Line, and Cave similes in Republic books vi and vii as filling out what’s

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required for the unity that’s described in book iv, 443d.) By uniting the soul in this
way, the Forms make subjectivity or a real “self ” possible, against materialism,
mechanism, relativism, and skepticism. Which is precisely what Hegel, too, is
seeking to do with his notions of subjectivity, the active universal, and so forth. I’ll
explain this way of reading Plato in some detail Chapters 5 and 6. Through it, Plato
is more “modern” than we generally recognize, and we can see how Hegel and the
modern focus on the “subject” or the “self ” continue Plato’s line of inquiry rather
than starting a new one.
What does differentiate Hegel from Plato is that in the name of the dimension
of “ascent,” Plato unlike Hegel sometimes seems to encourage us simply to reject
the body and the physical world. However, Plato is by no means consistent in
this rejection. In fact, the greater part of his work (in particular, his Republic,
Symposium, and Timaeus) can be read as explaining how the physical world itself
goes beyond its mere physicality. I’ll explain this aspect of Plato in Chapters 5–8.

Transcendence, freedom, and being

maximally real
So now we can return to Plato’s and Hegel’s arguments for God, which examine
the “vertical dimension” and its consequences. There is no reliance here on what’s
called “revelation” nor on the evidence of miracles, the authority of tradition,
or the apparent “design” in nature. Instead, Plato and Hegel offer a careful
examination of what human life is like.25 Their examination points to a familiar
and essentially uncontroversial experience: the experience of open-minded
inquiry, of questioning one’s initial opinions or desires or emotions, and looking
for a better basis for one’s beliefs and actions. Plato and Hegel suggest that our
engaging in these activities constitutes a commitment to a kind of transcendence,
a kind of “going beyond” the views and feelings that constitute our initial world.
Not only do we go beyond particular opinions, desires, or emotions in this process
of questioning, we go beyond them to something that’s both “higher,” because it’s
more authoritative, and in an important sense infinite. The new opinions, desires,
and emotions that we come up with are always open to further questioning and
revision, through the same process, in a way that’s in principle unlimited. This is
the literal meaning of “infinite.”
Both in “going beyond” our initial world, and in entering something that’s
“infinite,” this process parallels the traditional notion of the “transcendence”
by which God “goes beyond” the world. And even the atheist who denies the
existence of any God uses the sort of process that Plato and Hegel describe, when
she encourages other people to go beyond their initial opinions (blind faith in
God), toward opinions that will be better justified (that there is no God). So it’s

FREEDOM AND FULL REALITY    79

very hard to see how either “believers” or “non-believers” could ever do without
the kind of transcendence that Plato and Hegel are describing.
But what, one might ask, does this “infinite” process described by Plato and
Hegel have to do with the “infinite” reality that’s traditionally called God? To
answer this question, Hegel suggests that we look at the notion of “reality” itself.
What is a “reality”?—he asks; in particular, what would be the most “real” thing
that we can think of?
To this question, Hegel has a surprising and important answer. Consider
ourselves, he says. How “real” are we? And the first point he makes in response to
this question is that the desires and emotions that we initially feel and the opinions
that we initially lean toward have probably been produced, in us, by our social
environment or our biological heredity. Which means they’ve been produced
by something that’s not ourselves. In this way, we’re pretty much the products
of things that aren’t ourselves. So as ourselves, as distinct from the effects of our
environment and our heredity, we aren’t particularly real at all.
What, however, if we question our initial feelings and opinions, as we sometimes
seem to do, and thus set ourselves off from the people, the heredity, and so forth,
that have caused us to have these feelings and opinions? This questioning might
enable us to be guided by ourselves, as opposed to those other things. Being guided
by ourselves, we could be ourselves, and thus be real (as ourselves), to a greater
degree than something that’s merely the puppet of its initial feelings and opinions,
and through them of things that aren’t itself. This being guided by ourselves, rather
than by what our environment or our heredity have produced in us, is presumably
a major part of what we think of as our “freedom.”
This process of questioning and the resulting self-guidance makes something
more real as itself than something that’s merely a product of other things around
it. This isn’t to say that things that are produced by other things are illusions. But
being less self-sufficient than something that’s real as itself, what they are is less
“their own.” And thus as themselves, they’re less real than something that’s more
self-sufficient.

How can something be more “real”

than a rock? Plato/Hegel “idealism”
How can something be more “real” or more “self-sufficient” than a rock? A rock
is real enough to cause real pain, for sure, but it isn’t real enough to make itself
what it is. Instead, to a large extent, far from being self-sufficient, it is what it is
because of its environment and history. Questioners and inquirers, on the other
hand, seem to be able to separate themselves off from what they question, such as
their initial feelings and opinions. By doing this they can make themselves what

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they are, and thus be more real, as themselves, than a rock is. In fact, it seems
that by bringing the possibility of something’s being fully “itself ” into the world,
questioners or inquirers make it possible for the world as a whole to have a kind of
reality that it would otherwise lack.
This is the insight that leads Hegel to call himself and Plato “idealists.” As I’ve
mentioned, there are two other well-known varieties of “idealism” in modern
philosophy, neither of which is based (or at least, directly based) on this Plato/
Hegel insight. The Irish philosopher George Berkeley, in the eighteenth century,
argued that material objects were ultimately composed of “ideas” in human minds
or in the mind of God. Many people suppose that this famous doctrine is what
philosophical “idealism,” in general, boils down to.26 This is what G. E. Moore
supposed, in his famous “Refutation of Idealism” paper in 1902. Since most of us
are inclined to think that the best explanation of the large measure of agreement
between your ideas of the world and my ideas of the world is that there is a world
that’s separate from those ideas, few people have been willing to abandon the idea
of such a separate world.27
A second version of “idealism” is the “transcendental idealism” of Immanuel
Kant. (The “Transcendentalism” of Emerson and his New England friends took
its name from Kant’s terminology.) Kant maintained that the mind in some sense
“imposes” certain key features on all the reality that it knows.28 Kant’s idealism
faces the difficult problem of explaining why we should regard features that the
mind imposes on its experience as features of reality.
Fortunately, neither Plato nor Hegel endorses either Berkeley’s doctrine that
everything is ideas or minds or Kant’s doctrine that minds impose key features
on reality. So that Moore’s “Refutation of Idealism” was irrelevant to Plato’s and
Hegel’s versions of “idealism.”
Unlike Berkeley’s or Kant’s versions of “idealism,” Plato’s and Hegel’s version says
that thought makes it possible for some things, such as humans, to be more fully
real than rocks, by being more self-determining, and thus real as themselves. So
the most real things, according to Plato and Hegel, are things that embody thought
and freedom (and love, as we’ll see later). Rather than containing everything else
that exists, or imposing features on it, minds create what’s most self-determining
and consequently most real as itself, and thus they lend to the world as a whole
whatever full reality (reality as itself) it possesses.
This Plato/Hegel “idealism” of self-determination certainly isn’t identical with
what we call “common sense,” but it doesn’t directly contradict common sense, as
Berkeley’s and Kant’s doctrines do. Instead, you might say, it “adds to” common
sense. It’s the result of common sense’s “going beyond itself,” by giving closer
attention than it generally gives to some of its basic concerns, such as freedom
and reality.29
For purposes of interpreting Plato and Hegel, it’s crucial to see that reality,
for them, can’t be “in the minds of ” finite beings like ourselves, because such

FREEDOM AND FULL REALITY    81

beings, insofar as they are finite, can’t themselves be fully real. It’s only through
the “kinship” that Plato thinks souls have with the original reality (Meno 81d) that
they can know any true reality, and Hegel (for whom only the infinite is real, HSL
p. 149, GW 21:136; SuW 5:164) holds essentially the same view.

Is this view “anthropocentric”?

Seen in the light of the Plato/Hegel “idealism,” Berkeley’s and Kant’s “idealisms”
look like unsuccessful attempts to articulate an important truth. The truth is that
by functioning in the world, minds enable the world to have a fuller reality than
it can have without them. They enable it to be more self-determining. Berkeley
and Kant fail to make this clear, when they make nature’s sheer existence, or its
possession of some of its key features, depend upon the presence of minds. Failing
to articulate the important truth that Plato and Hegel articulate, Berkeley and Kant
invite the charge of anthropocentrism: that they give an unjustifiable centrality, in
the universe, to humans as such.
In 1910, George Santayana described philosophy since Socrates as “egotistical”
and “anthropocentric.”30 Santayana was evidently seeing the Socratic tradition
as epitomized in Berkeley’s or Kant’s type of idealism. He didn’t envisage the
possibility that Plato and Hegel put forward: that it’s not the “universe” of which
freedom is the center. Rather, it’s something that the universe accomplishes, in the
form of self-determining freedom.
Rather than making humans the center of the universe, Plato and Hegel
make human freedom (as well as the freedom of any other species that has
comparable capacities) the center of the highest thing, the fullest reality, that
the universe accomplishes.31 A proper modesty, on our part, needn’t prevent
us from drawing the manifestly significant distinction between the kind of
self-determination that trees and rocks achieve and the kind that humans can
apparently achieve. We blame humans who injure us, in a way that we don’t
blame trees and rocks that injure us. Humans can govern themselves in a way
that trees and rocks can’t. Since we make this distinction, we should recognize
as well that beings that (to some extent) govern themselves have greater reality,
as themselves, than beings that don’t. Recognizing this, we can appropriately
describe such beings as contributing to something that goes beyond the reality
of trees and rocks, as such.
Nor should we think that “being oneself ” is just an “interest” that certain
species or certain individuals happen to have. This interest seems to have clear
implications for the kind of reality that those species or individuals can achieve.
Those that succeed, sometimes, in being themselves are (to that extent) more real,
as themselves. Those that don’t succeed in being themselves, are real only through
their relations to other things.32

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 When Friedrich Nietzsche lamented, “Hasn’t precisely the self-belittlement
of man, his will to self-belittlement been marching relentlessly forward since
Copernicus?” he wasn’t regretting that humans can no longer think of themselves
as the center of the universe.33 Nietzsche had no nostalgia for a geocentric universe.
Rather, he was thinking that humans shouldn’t belittle themselves, and that to
the extent that humans do so, something that’s beyond humans may be needed.
Something that won’t belittle itself, but instead will have proper respect for its own
power or accomplishment.
Nietzsche didn’t agree with the specifics of Plato’s or Hegel’s way of conceiving
human accomplishment, but he did agree with them in thinking of humans as being
capable of participating in something of great importance. And this importance
had nothing to do with our being located at the cosmos’s physical center, or with
our giving it its sheer existence or basic features.

What does this freedom look like

in practice? Spiritual groundedness
versus charisma
What does inner freedom or becoming one’s true self look like in practice? Think
of the more spiritually gifted people we’ve encountered. I don’t mean “gurus,”
though I imagine some of them would qualify, but just the people among us who
really “have something.” Maybe they’ve “been through a lot,” and emerged with a
wisdom that sets them apart from the ordinary run of people; or maybe they seem
to have been “born with” a spiritual gift that does that.
Don’t such people give us a sense of “solidity,” of embodying something that’s
more reliable and lasting than most of us manage to embody? They’re probably
fluid and adaptable, in many respects, but beneath that adaptability, there’s a
bedrock or a still point, which doesn’t need to adapt, because it’s (in effect) eternal.
This is the “reality” that I’m talking about: the thing that’s really itself. Its presence
gives the world as a whole, in spite of all of its fragility and change, an eternity that
it would otherwise lack.
Note that the quality that I’m describing isn’t the same as “charisma,” such as
many show business people and religious and political leaders have. Charisma
sets people apart, just as spiritual groundedness does. And spiritual groundedness
generally gives a person one kind of charisma. But unlike spiritual groundedness,
charisma doesn’t need to be associated with any significant degree of self-
understanding.
To have what I’m calling spiritual groundedness, by being truly herself, a person
needs to have become free of her “baggage.” She needs to be free of any obsessions,
compulsions, and fears she may have acquired in her early years, which would

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otherwise keep her under the power of what’s other than herself. Any politician,
preacher, or movie star who has to be “on,” in public, because he depends upon an
audience’s adulation to make him feel okay with himself, clearly is not free in this way.

Freedom, and love and compassion

Picturing these spiritually grounded people is likely to bring to mind another
feature that these people all seem to possess in addition to freedom. This feature
seems to be separate, in principle, from true freedom, but they’re not ultimately
separable. It’s universal love or compassion. People who have become free from
the power of what’s other than themselves have the opportunity to care for others
in a way the rest of us don’t. We fail to care for other things and people because
we’re preoccupied with our own needs and desires—that is, with ourselves. The
free person, not being preoccupied by her personal desires, can relate to what’s
really going on with other people. This gives the other people the sense that they’re
deeply understood by the free person, in a way that they wouldn’t be understood
by someone who is (as we say) self-involved.
And free people not only have this opportunity to truly understand others,
they seem automatically to take it. As Rumi says, “Why would you refuse to give
this joy to anyone?”34 Suppose you’re in a posture of separating yourself off from
something, such as other people’s needs or their freedom. If only by paying a kind
of attention to your own needs that you don’t pay to the needs of others. Then
you’re dominated by your relationship to—your closure toward—the other people,
and you’re not free.35 Much freer to be the “ocean” that Rumi refers to in his poem.
No doubt each of us has a “separate life” to live, as far as our biological existence
is concerned. And it’s certainly an appropriate division of labor that each of us
should take particular care, most of the time, of our own biological needs. But
when my life can contribute to yours, and yours to mine, the biological dividing
lines cease to have the importance that they have when we’re each preoccupied
primarily or exclusively with our personal needs and wants.
So at least in close-to-ideal cases, it seems that the questioning or inquiring
that constitutes freedom necessarily carries with it a developed capacity for love
or compassion. We all know people who seem to be much more developed in
questioning than in love or compassion, or in love or compassion than in
questioning. This is because the capacity for questioning is a more intellectual
capacity, and the capacity for love or compassion is a more emotional one, and
intellectual and emotional development don’t always go hand in hand. But in
close-to-ideal cases they have to go hand in hand, because excluding other people
from our concern reduces our personal freedom. So people who really have their
eye on (inner as well as outer) freedom always show a developed concern for other
people as well.

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Are this freedom and “full reality”
really possible?
Whatever you think about love and compassion, you may well wonder whether
it’s realistic to suppose that freedom of the kind that I’m describing can actually
exist in the physical world. Can humans really separate themselves from their
environment and become self-determining, and thus more “real,” as themselves?
Shouldn’t we assume on the contrary that every thought, like every other event
in the world, is caused by previous events in the world, many of which took place
outside the person? Wouldn’t this imply that the person’s thinking can never be
fully “self-determining”?
These are important questions. But we have commonsense evidence of our
ability to separate ourselves from our environment. This is our everyday experience
of trying to arrive at conceptions of reality and plans of action that are better
justified than our initial opinions and desires. We do this every day, for example, in
the very discussion we’ve having right now, about whether freedom is real. We’re
trying to figure out what conception of reality is most justified. Likewise when we
wonder which would really be the best career or the best life partner for us.
In these discussions and wonderings, we’re trying to go beyond our initial
opinions and find something that will be better justified. But if we succeed in
doing this, it seems clear that we’ll become more self-guided and therefore more
“ourselves” than we were before. Rather than being guided by whatever first comes
to mind, which could come from anywhere, we’ll be guided by our own thinking,
which is “us” if anything is.
In this way, all of our serious thoughts presuppose that we can be more self-
guided. They presuppose that we can be guided by what’s justified, as opposed
to what we instinctively, initially, think or desire. Consequently, if we are to
take seriously an analysis of the relation between causation and freedom or
self-guidance, that analysis will have to explain, rather than undermine, this
experience of making ourselves more self-guided. For if the analysis undermined
this experience, it would undermine itself.
Note that in saying that we can be more self-guided, I’m not claiming that there
will be no external causes for what we do. I’m not taking any position about the
relation between causation and freedom, or about what’s “external” and what’s
“internal.” I suspect that causation, like freedom, is a topic that we don’t yet
understand very well.36 The one thing that I’m certain of is that I need to take
seriously my own interest in figuring out what’s most justified. That, and not the
“absence of external causes,” as such, is what’s essential to “self-guidance.”
I conclude, then, that our everyday experience strongly supports the idea that
we are sometimes more self-guided than we are at other times. This is all that my
notion of inner freedom and self-guidance supposes.37

FREEDOM AND FULL REALITY    85

 The idea of self-guidance as “separating ourselves from our environment” may
suggest an unattractive picture of mutually impenetrable, hermetically sealed
boxes. But if we influence each other through love, which values and promotes the
freedom of the other person, and by sharing thought, which does the same, we can
have any amount of mutual “influence” without reducing each other’s freedom at
all. A person who is self-guided doesn’t ignore the world and the people around her.
She evaluates whatever they tell her in the light of her own thinking about what’s
true and what’s good, and when she concludes that what they tell her is probably
itself true or good, she embraces it. What “separates” her from her environment
is simply the fact that she evaluates everything in the light of her own thinking.

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4 FULL REALITY IS GOD

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon all things,
and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. . . . What we
commonly call man, . . . him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ
he is, would he but let it appear through his action, would make our knees
bend. . . . So [there is] no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect,
ceases, and God, the cause, begins.
EMERSON, “THE OVER-SOUL”

From being oneself to God

So what does this “transcendence,” self-guidance, and being real as oneself have
to do with God? “God” or “the divine” is the traditional name for something
that’s more real than the everyday world and that lends some of its own reality
to that world, by, as the Bible says, “creating” it. But the questioner that Plato and
Hegel describe, who goes beyond everyday “reality” and thereby gives it a fuller
reality than it would have by itself, seems to do something exactly parallel to what
“God” traditionally does. The questioner makes the world (more) real, more self-
sufficient and self-determining.
So Plato and Hegel both suggest that this questioner is the key to the rational
core of religion.1 The activity of questioning creates the vertical dimension, in
which X “is higher than” Y, that religion has always been about. By virtue of its
questioning, X is superior to Y, more authoritative and more self-determining or
more fully real than Y. X “transcends” Y.
Religion, Plato and Hegel say, doesn’t need to be about the sheer “power” of a
heavenly “father,” who lays down the law and protects or punishes his “children”—
nor does it need to be about the sheer “powers” of a pantheon of gods. These are
natural primitive images for what religion is about. But if we take these images
literally, they make God merely a very powerful part of the world, the same kind
of thing that the world itself is, rather than something that’s truly higher than the
world because it has an inherent authority that the world does not have.
So what the most rationally defensible religion is about, Plato and Hegel suggest,
is the authority that anyone may achieve, to the extent that they go beyond their
instinctive urges and achieve freedom and love. The germ of truth in the idea of
God as “father” is that many fathers and mothers do in fact go beyond mere instinct,
in this way, and thus do achieve some real authority. Being about this real authority,
religion is also about the way this authority’s presence in the world changes the
world, by making it more self-determining, and in that sense, more real.
It’s probably a more familiar idea that love transforms the world, than that
questioning one’s initial desires and opinions transforms the world. We’re familiar
with the idea that a strong emotion, like love, can change everything for us. And
we’re also familiar with the suggestion that God is love, and that the presence of
this love in the world changes everything.
What I’ve been offering in this account of Plato’s and Hegel’s conception of
questioning, and the way it “changes everything,” is in fact only the other side of
the coin of the way love, or God as love, changes everything. A person who seeks
freedom can’t afford to cut herself off from the world, because to be cut off from
something is to be defined by one’s relationship to that thing. So questioning and
freedom aren’t cut off, but instead they’re loving and compassionate.
As I said earlier, this is true in the ideal case, and not necessarily in intermediate
cases like you and me. But God, obviously, is the ideal case. Thus God is the sum of
all the best functioning, both in the sense of questioning and in the sense of love,
that there is.
What religion expresses is the thought that this “going beyond” initial urges, and
the freedom and love that result from this “going beyond,” transform everything.
That, in fact, they make everything more real, more self-sufficient, more “itself,”
than it is when it’s merely finite, material, and natural. We can understand all
the major religious notions, including “creation,” “law-giving,” “transcendence,”
“eternity,” “heaven,” “liberation,” “enlightenment,” “salvation,” and “worship” as
being about this greater reality, self-sufficiency, “itself ”-ness, and love. And we can
understand in the same way “sin,” “divine punishment,” and “damnation,” which
are our state of being (self-) exiled from the greater reality of freedom and from
the love that goes with it.

Isn’t “God” supposed to be

a separate being?
As I’ve pointed out in previous chapters, monotheists generally agree that God
is infinite, unbounded. Only something that’s infinite can be completely self-

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determining, completely free, and everyone agrees that the one God should be as
free as possible. But if God is a separate being, God can’t be unbounded or infinite,
because a God who is “separate” clearly is bounded by the other beings that this
God is “separate from.” So a separate God clearly is not unbounded, not infinite,
and not completely free.
So to make God infinite and free, Platonists think of God not as a separate
being but as the interiority, the capacity for becoming more “itself,” of the world
of ordinary beings. God is “within us,” as Plotinus puts it.2 As Hegel puts it, God
is ordinary beings’ transcending what they ordinarily are, by achieving freedom
(self-determination) and love. Hegel calls this a “true infinity” because, since it’s
not “separate from” anything else, it’s not prevented, by being bounded by what it’s
separate from, from being infinite.
Plato and Hegel recognize that it’s difficult to talk about this truly infinite God,
so that for many purposes a kind of storytelling is legitimate in which we speak
“as though” God were a separate being (or separate beings). But these stories must
always be taken as stories. The literal truth will be that the truly infinite God is
composed of the transcendence by which finite beings like ourselves sometimes
go beyond our instinctive urges and opinions and become, to a significant degree,
self-determining and thus infinite.

This doctrine doesn’t say that

God is humans
Of course I have to explain immediately that this doctrine that God is composed
of our going beyond our instinctive urges doesn’t imply that God just is human
beings. It doesn’t imply this because insofar as we humans are guided simply by
our initial urges and opinions, we clearly are not God, because we aren’t self-
determining. Rather, it’s what we do and what anything else in the universe does
that goes beyond initial urges and opinions, that “is God,” by bringing a fuller
(because self-determining) reality into the world.
Both Plato and Hegel suggest that the freedom and love that go beyond initial
urges and opinions, also go beyond what’s merely “human,” and that this makes
them, in effect, divine. God is what humans, and anything else in the universe
that has capacities similar to ours, become when we go beyond our initial urges
and opinions by means of rational questioning and self-determination. For in this
way we become something that’s no longer merely human: something higher and
something more fully real (because real as ourselves) than we are when we’re mere
puppets of our environments, which gave us our urges and opinions.
I discussed Ludwig Feuerbach’s convoluted “anthropotheism,” for which God
apparently is human beings, in the previous chapter.

FULL REALITY IS GOD    89

But the doctrine does connect humans to
God, in an important way
Though Plato’s and Hegel’s God is not humans, as such, their God is intimately
connected to humans. Inspired by the Platonists, St Augustine wrote that God “is
more inward [to me] than I am myself.” And Jelaluddin Rumi, “When you look for
God, God is in the look of your eyes, in the thought of looking,”3 because a genuine
search for God takes you beyond your initial, natural urges and opinions, and into
something that’s no longer merely human, but higher. In that sense, your search
for God is God’s own looking and God’s own thought.
This connection between God and our search for God is what the mystical
traditions are pointing to when they tell us that God is “within us,” and therefore
is “in” the world—that, as Rumi says, “there’s no need to go outside.” What’s truly
within us, Rumi is saying, is truly beyond our normal desires and opinions and has
the authority that comes from the full reality of self-determination. So when they
say that God is “nearer to us than ourselves,” Augustine and Rumi aren’t giving us
just a provocative paradox; they’re pointing to the crucial fact that we can always
go deeper, further “within,” than our present conception of who we are.
Talk about God, Plato and Hegel tell us, is ultimately based on the experience
of going “within,” which is also the experience of going “higher than” our normal,
everyday desires and opinions, in search of desires and opinions that have more
authority because they’re more truly our own. This is an experience that every one
of us has, insofar as we question our initial desires and opinions, and ask ourselves
what we should really be guided by. “God” is our image or name for the possibility
that we might find a satisfying answer to that question.
It seems clear that we can’t do without some such idea, without abandoning a
fundamental human function: asking ourselves what we should really be guided
by. And what’s striking, when we see the connection between “God” and this
human function, is how intimately “God” and humans then are interconnected.
They’re not identical, but they’re manifestly inseparable. “There’s no need to go
outside,” to get from one to the other.
It seems, then, that if we abandon “God”-talk we may be in danger of abandoning
a fundamental human function, which is our search, beyond our normal, everyday
desires and opinions, for desires and opinions that would be more truly our own.
“Nearer to us than ourselves,” as we normally conceive of ourselves. Being more
truly our own, this goal of ours constitutes a higher reality than our everyday
desires and opinions, and thus we can appropriately call it “God.”
But when we’ve finally seen why we can’t abandon this fundamental human
function, and “God” in it, we also see how mistaken are some of the consequences
that people have drawn from conventional “God”-talk. In particular, the idea that
we don’t have to think about what we should do or believe, but just be “told by

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God” what to do or believe. This idea is mistaken because Plato and Hegel (and
Rumi) have shown us that what the idea of “God” itself is really about is our going
beyond our initial feelings and opinions, precisely by thinking.
But we shouldn’t interpret this lesson in a way that turns it, in its turn, into
a mere dogma. For example, we shouldn’t suppose that “prayer,” then, is an
inappropriate way to relate to God. For much traditional “prayer” might in fact
qualify very well as “thinking,” if it involves emptying one’s mind of extraneous
matters and trying to be open to new, clarifying insights, coming from somewhere
“higher” than one’s everyday thoughts.
So now we can see why God and free inquiry are inseparable. Free inquiry
makes possible the genuine self-determination that is God. And when we
understand how free inquiry does this, we understand that if free inquiry exists,
God exists.

Free inquiry, as doubt, is part of God

If free inquiry is part of what constitutes God, so that “you don’t need to go
outside” to find God, then doubting the existence of God is pretty futile. For that
very doubt is part of God. The most real thing, the ens realissimum, achieves its
reality by doubting every initial opinion, since this doubting enables it to be self-
determining, and thus real in a way that things that can’t engage in doubt can’t be.
So doubting the existence of God is just a necessary part of the universal doubt and
resulting self-determination that constitutes God.
More precisely, this universal doubt helps to constitute God. For an equally
essential part of God is universal love. Since intellect and the emotions are partially
independent of each other, transcendence can’t be understood solely in terms of
intellect (inquiry) or solely in terms of the emotions (love). It has to be understood
in terms of both of them, acting together.
But in the ideal case, as I’ve explained, intellectual transcendence and emotional
transcendence must go together. So in the ideal case the love of truth, or thought,
will go beyond egoism to universal love. And since God, clearly, is the ideal
case, the universal doubt or inquiry that is one aspect of God will necessarily be
accompanied by God’s other aspect, which is universal love.
But what’s true in the “ideal case” will also be true in the portion or aspect of
actual life that embodies the ideal. So if rational doubt, the pursuit of truth, is truly
present, then we can infer that something truly self-determining is present, which
(as such) is more real than anything else that we’re acquainted with. And if we
consider only the truly self-determining aspect of what’s going on, this aspect must
also embody universal love.
But if the discussion that we’re having now doesn’t really pursue truth and
attempt to be rational, then this discussion is pointless and we might as well drop

FULL REALITY IS GOD    91

it. So if we suppose that our present discussion isn’t pointless, we should hope or
suppose that something that’s truly truth-pursuing and rational, and thus truly
self-determining, is present in it.
But nothing can be more real than what’s truly self-determining. So we should
hope or suppose that the most real thing, the ens realissimum, is present, at least
to some degree, in our discussion. And to the extent that this most real thing is
present, universal love is also present.
So from the plausible premise that rational doubt or the pursuit of truth is truly
present in our current discussion, we seem to have demonstrated the presence in
our discussion of something that’s more real than anything else and that embodies
universal love. What else could we call this thing but “God”?
Well, of course we could decide to reserve the word, “God,” for a very powerful
external and finite reality such as God often seems to be in the Hebrew scriptures.
Then we could call the truly infinite God within us something else, such as “the
philosophers’ God,” or “the Absolute,” or whatever.
I myself think that traditional religion meant to talk about something that’s
truly infinite, even though it was often unclear about how to do so. So it seems
appropriate to me to call the truly infinite God, simply “God.”

So that if I doubt, God exists

Thus, revising Rene Descartes’s famous formula, in his Meditations (1641), that “I
think, therefore I am,” which he also expressed as “I doubt, therefore I am,” we can
say that “I doubt, therefore God exists.”
Descartes’s original formulation has problems. It’s reasonable to wonder
whether he was justified in inferring his own existence from his thinking or his
doubting, since such an inference would have to justify him in asserting the
existence of something that was himself as distinct from other things. When he’s
aware that thinking is going on, how does he know that he rather than you or I is
doing this thinking? How does he know anything about the distinction between
himself and others, and how to apply it, in this case?
But there is less reason to doubt the inference from “I doubt” to “Something is
present that’s potentially self-determining, and not self-centered, but loving, and
thus divine.” For such a divinity, as I’ve been suggesting, needn’t be distinct from
other things in the questionable way in which Descartes himself apparently has to
be, for his own inference to be valid.
As Rumi says, God in a sense is “nearer to you than yourself.” For God is more
“inner” to you than your identity as a particular person or thing, among other
persons or things. It’s because of God’s being “within” us, as our doubt, self-
determination, and love, that we can know that God exists. And it’s because the
doubt, self-determination, and love that are within us in this way, go beyond us,

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and beyond the finite world in general, by having an authority that finite beings as
such can’t have, that it’s appropriate for us to call them “God.”4

And we are free and responsible

Having outlined Plato’s and Hegel’s conception of God, we can return to the
question of whether there could be a real God who wouldn’t need to override
human freedom of thought and action and human responsibility. Plato’s and
Hegel’s God can’t override human freedom, because this God is human freedom.
(With the emphasis on the “freedom,” as I’ve explained, rather than on the “human,”
which by itself certainly isn’t God.)
Fundamentalists and dogmatists are right to insist on our need for something
that goes beyond our merely human ideas and feelings and standards of conduct.
But they’re wrong to think that the only place where we can find such a higher
standard is in “commands” that are imposed on us and which have nothing to do
with our own free thought and insight. Rather, the higher standard must be found
by the kind of thinking that goes beyond initial opinions and feelings, in an effort
to arrive at something that’s better justified than they are.
We’ve all had the experience of revising our initial opinions and our initial
feelings as a result of thought, so we all know that in some way, it’s possible to go
beyond them. And it’s this going beyond, Plato and Hegel suggest, that underlies
the idea of a “higher standard.” Fundamentalists and dogmatists are right to insist
on the need for such a standard, but wrong to think of it as resulting from the sheer
commands of a God whom we must obey, but whom we can’t hope to understand
or freely embrace.
The fundamentalists and dogmatists and the atheists who suspect that a
real “God” would deprive us of our freedom all miss the key point. That point
is that we can have a higher standard that’s not alien to us, and consequently
doesn’t threaten our freedom, if we understand both the higher standard and
our freedom as being created by the process of revising our initial opinions and
desires through thought.
Our freedom results from this process because questioning and revising our
initial opinions and desires allows us to be guided less by things that are external
to us, and more by ourselves, than we are initially. If our freedom and our true
self is our ability to go beyond our initial desires and opinions, then the result of
that going beyond isn’t alien to us. We are this going beyond, insofar as we’re free,
and truly ourselves. The only aspect of us to which this God is alien, and which
she or he “overrides,” is our “merely human” aspect. We can welcome even our
merely human aspect into the fold, when and if it questions and goes beyond itself
and thus achieves freedom and full reality. And as “God,” we have infinite loving
patience.

FULL REALITY IS GOD    93

 Once we’ve established that our own freedom is compatible with, and indeed
helps to constitute, the higher reality that we call “God,” it’s clear that this God no
longer threatens our responsibility for our actions. If we’re free, we’re responsible.
This, no doubt, is why Kant wrote in his Opus postumum that “the commanding
subject is God,” but “this commanding being is not outside man as a substance
different from man” (Akad. 21:21).5 To solve his long-standing problem of how
divine creation and human freedom could be compatible, Kant was apparently
reaching for the Plato/Hegel conception of a transcendent God that is not “a
separate being.”
Finally, we have the familiar issue of how we can be responsible for our actions
if God was able, from eternity, to foresee them and prevent them if God wished to
do so. The story about God that I’ve been telling makes it clear that God isn’t an
“independent agent,” set over against our actions and able to “interfere” with them
in the way that we suppose when we formulate this issue. God is the highest reality,
more real than we (as mere human beings) are, but God’s reality nevertheless has a
kind of dependence upon the lower realities that we are. If we weren’t free to make
a mess of things, through actions that we’ll regret later, we wouldn’t be able truly
to go beyond ourselves through freedom and love, and in that case there would be
no God or ultimate reality.
In this way, the seemingly interminable dispute between “orthodox” and
“Pelagian” thinking, in Christianity, is revealed as misconceived and unnecessary.
Those who emphasize God’s agency and those who emphasize human freedom are
in fact emphasizing the same thing. The reason why, as orthodoxy correctly insists,
we often feel powerless to save ourselves is not that we need to be saved by some
“other being,” but that inner freedom (and the love that goes with it) often seem
to be out of our reach. Our own freedom and love often emerge only in response
to the freedom and love of other people. Orthodox thinking is right to insist on
this human experience of needing the “grace” of something “other.” One could
interpret the doctrine of original sin as a poetic way of expressing this reality,
which does call for a certain kind of “surrender,” a turning to something “other”
for what we ourselves most need.
However, Pelagians are nevertheless right to insist that taken as a totality,
freedom and love are self-sufficient. There is no parcel of freedom and love to
which we have to turn that’s essentially separate from us humans and our world.
For if there were such a separate parcel, it wouldn’t be fully free and therefore it
wouldn’t be able to give us what we need. In order to be fully free, God and God’s
love must be in the world. This is the fundamental adequacy of the “human” will
that Pelagians correctly emphasize.
But it doesn’t mean that we humans, as such, are (together with the world) the
only reality. Without freedom and love, we aren’t fully ourselves and thus we aren’t
fully real. As orthodox thinking insists, there is in fact a higher and fuller reality (of
freedom and love). What orthodoxy often overlooks, however, is how this higher

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and fuller reality must be in “this” world, the world that we experience every day, by
being our potential or actual freedom and love. Insofar as Pelagianism makes this
latter point, it too is indispensable. Thus God’s being in the world, as the world’s
own freedom and love, dissolves the antinomy of orthodoxy versus Pelagianism.
When each of them is properly interpreted, it’s compatible with the other.

An unconventional conception of God

What I’ve been saying raises a natural question. How can I call this highest reality
“God,” if he, she, or it is “inseparable from” or “has a kind of dependence on” the
lower realities that we are? Isn’t God supposed to be completely “independent” of
everything else?
Here I need to remind you that a God who’s defined as not being other things
and not depending on them, is in fact made dependent by that relationship.
“The God who is not all these other things” depends on the others in the most
intimate possible way, through its very definition. Such a God is defined not by
itself but by its relationship to these other things, and thus is radically dependent
and limited.
Whereas a God who includes other things, but includes them by being their
going beyond themselves, doesn’t depend upon them and isn’t limited by them,
precisely inasmuch as it goes beyond them. So that, paradoxically but truly, the
way to be fully independent is to include (in this way), rather than to exclude,
what’s “other” than oneself.
Does the God that I’ve been describing, who doesn’t “intervene” in events
in the world from “outside” it, nevertheless “make a difference”? The greatest
difference one could imagine, because this God makes the world fully real, self-
determining, and itself, in a way that nature by itself, without going beyond itself,
couldn’t do. And in a way that the conventional God, who’s defined as “not being”
all other things, can’t do either, because this definition prevents the conventional
God from being self-determining, so the conventional God has no full reality to
lend to anything else. The conventional “God” is simply another being, alongside
the beings that make up “nature,” and just as limited by its relations to those
beings as they are by their relations to each other. Regardless of how much
power it may have over other beings, if it’s in the same category as they are, as a
countable, additional “being,” it’s limited by its relationship to them and isn’t fully
self-determining.
This is Hegel’s critique of the conventional conception of God. What I’ve been
laying out in the preceding pages is his alternative to that conventional conception.
Since Hegel’s God is the way in which nature or the world goes beyond itself,
through our questioning, his God isn’t limited by what it goes beyond, and thus
his God really is supernatural, beyond nature.

FULL REALITY IS GOD    95

Not the conventional “creator”
Hegel’s God doesn’t, indeed, correspond to the conventional conception of the
“Creator.” Richard Dawkins spells that conception out in what he calls “the God
hypothesis,” that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence which
deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including
us.”6 The hypothesis that Dawkins describes is certainly familiar, but that doesn’t
mean that it makes sense. An intelligence that deliberately designed and created
the universe would not be truly supernatural, because its separate existence
over against the universe that it created would make it limited, finite. Nature,
presumably, includes all finite beings. So rather than really going beyond nature,
this very powerful intelligence would be an additional, rather unusual being that
we should add to our list of the beings that a comprehensive survey of nature
would have to include. It’s only by trying to describe a God that isn’t (in fact)
just another finite being, like the beings that she or he “creates,” that we can hope
to arrive at something that’s truly infinite and thus truly supernatural, beyond
nature.
A thinking believer who becomes aware of this fact about what’s truly
infinite and truly supernatural will want to revise the conventional notions of
“God” and the “Creator” so that what they describe will be truly infinite and
truly beyond nature. Plato and Hegel show us how to do this. If we think of
God as including the world of finite things, by being that world’s surpassing of
its finite-ness, through freedom, then this God isn’t limited by the world, but is
truly infinite.
The Plato/Hegel “God within us” that gives the world its only full reality, its
reality as itself, without being opposed to the world as yet another “being,” is
the truth that underlies the conventional, anthropomorphic idea of a separate
“creator” God, which Richard Dawkins describes. Unlike the God that Dawkins
describes, the Plato/Hegel God is truly supernatural. And unlike the God that
Dawkins describes, the Plato/Hegel God is directly known by us, since it’s our
own freedom.
Thus Dawkins is mistaken in assuming that his conventional “God hypothesis” is
representative of the best thinking about God, so that by discrediting it he can show
that “God,” as such, is a “delusion.” Like the best thinking in many other fields, the
best thinking about God isn’t necessarily the best-known or the most conventional
thinking.
Nor, as I’ve mentioned in previous chapters, is conventional thinking necessarily
the same as “orthodox” religious doctrine. For the notion of our “becoming God,”
and thus of God’s not being simply a separate being from us, appears very early in
the history of Christianity and is preserved in such repositories of orthodoxy as
the Roman Catholic Catechism and Mass.

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Why this isn’t “pantheism”
In his widely read book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis described Hegel’s conception
of God as “pantheist” and said that people who believe in pantheism “don’t take
the difference between good and bad very seriously.”7
According to the dictionary, “pantheism” is “a doctrine that equates God with
the forces and laws of the universe.” And it’s true that a God who was identical
with the forces and laws of the universe wouldn’t seem to exhibit or embody much
concern about the difference between good and bad. But Hegel in fact identifies
God with the universe’s going beyond itself toward something that’s more rational
and (in that way) more self-determining; and a God that was identical with the
universe’s forces and laws clearly wouldn’t do that. So Hegel can’t be a pantheist.
Lewis seems to assume that God must either be a being that’s separate from
the world or be identical with the world. Lewis doesn’t realize that a being that’s
separate from the world would, to that extent, be limited, and thus not self-
determining, and not truly supernatural. He also, consequently, doesn’t see how
Hegel’s God succeeds in being self-determining, and truly supernatural, by being
the world’s going beyond itself.
Only nature can be truly supernatural, by going beyond itself, by seeking what’s
rational. This is because something that’s opposed to nature, in the way that “God” as
conventionally conceived is opposed to nature, is thereby limited and might as well
be counted as a part of nature. This paradoxical but necessary fact is what Hegel’s
“dialectic,” in his Science of Logic, is all about. It’s about how we can get guidance
from something that’s truly “higher” than ourselves, and higher than nature, rather
than just being another being (however powerful) alongside us and nature.
Hegel certainly can’t fairly be accused of not taking the difference between good
and bad seriously, since his conception of God is built around precisely the process
of our going beyond our initial, limited desires and opinions, in pursuit of what’s
higher and more rational. Which indeed appears under its traditional name, as the
“Good,” toward the end of Hegel’s Science of Logic.8
Probably Lewis didn’t realize how central the difference between the rational
(and the “good”) and the merely instinctive is in Hegel’s thinking, because the
British Idealists, who advocated Hegel’s importance in the generation before Lewis,
didn’t get this aspect of Hegel’s thinking into focus. So Lewis is, unfortunately, in
good company here. I focus on Lewis’s brief discussion only because it’s widely read.

How it differs from “life force” or

“quantum” theology
Lewis mentions another alternative to his own conventional Christian theology:
the doctrine of “creative evolution,” propounded by the French philosopher Henri

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Bergson, or the notion of a “life force,” popularized by the Irish/British dramatist,
George Bernard Shaw. Lewis accuses these doctrines, as he accuses Hegel’s, of involving
“no morals,” and therefore of offering “all of the thrills of religion and none of the cost.”9
Looking for comparable conceptions in our own time, we might think of
the “quantum” theology of Fritjof Capra, Fred Alan Wolf, Deepak Chopra, and
the popular film, What the “Bleep” Do We Know? They all suggest that quantum
indeterminacy, and the role of the “observer” in resolving it, demonstrate the
reality of something like God, or the soul, or the Tao.10 Certainly modern physics is
weird, and some professional physicists do draw connections between the widely
accepted weird physical theories and broader metaphysical views. But Plato and
Hegel, like Lewis, would object that the recent advocates of “quantum” theology
don’t explain what’s “higher,” or good, or deserving of worship, in the God or soul
or Tao that they think quantum physics points to.
For their part, Plato and Hegel explain that what’s good about God and the
soul is that they seek to be guided by what’s good, and thus to be free, instead of
responding in a merely automatic way to their environment. This feature of God
and the soul is what makes it useful to talk about God and the soul, rather than just
talking about quanta and atoms and the human brain.
Classical Chinese Taoism seems to resemble Plato and Hegel, on this point,
when it contrasts “heaven” and “earth,” where “heaven” seems to be that which is
“above,” or good, and earth seems to be the finite and imperfect. Taoism may not
be “dualistic” in the way that the “quantum” theologians often object to, but it does
assume that there’s a significant distinction between heaven and earth:

People model themselves on the earth.

The earth models itself on Heaven.
Heaven models itself on the Way.
The Way models itself on what is self-so.11

Since quantum physics tells us nothing about seeking to be guided by something

“higher,” it fails to illuminate this key feature of God or the soul or the Tao. So
whatever quantum physics may or may not “prove,” it looks as though we still
need the sort of philosophical theology that I’m presenting in this book, in order
to understand what God or the soul or the Tao is really about.
Lewis is right to criticize some of the recent popular theologies for apparently
leaving out the moral dimension. But he’s mistaken in thinking that Hegel’s
theology leaves it out.

How it differs from “deism”

Another recognized alternative to the conventional conception of God is “deism.”
According to this view, again according to a dictionary definition, there is an all-

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powerful Creator who designed the world, in the beginning, and brought it into
being complete with the laws of nature that govern it, but took no interest in it
after that, leaving it to run on its own. Some eighteenth-century intellectuals saw
deism as a way to separate God from the domain of science, without doing away
with God altogether.
It’s clear that Hegel and the Platonic tradition, as I’ve presented them, aren’t
“deist,” in this sense, because they describe God as intimately involved with the
world, at all times and places. It’s true that they don’t describe God as “intervening”
in the world through “miracles.” They agree with deism in that respect. But
unlike deism’s God, Plato’s and Hegel’s God, as our innermost “self,” is intimately
connected with everything, especially with humans, and completely “available”
whenever we turn to it. In this way, Plato’s and Hegel’s God stands much closer to
traditional conceptions of God than deism does.

How it fulfills Martin Heidegger’s

requirements
In a much-quoted passage, Martin Heidegger stated without argument that
“one can neither pray nor sacrifice to this [god of philosophy]. Before the causa
sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance
before this god” (Identity and Difference [2002], p. 72). But we do in fact pray
and sacrifice to the Plato/Hegel God, inasmuch as we seek its guidance and the
resulting peace of mind, and we give up our selfish and self-important schemes.
And quantities of awe and music and dance are in fact addressed to this God,
both outside institutionalized religion and within it. For whenever we celebrate
the infinite power and authority of inner freedom, love, forgiveness, or beauty, we
celebrate this God. The “insect” (Edward Young) that we can feel ourselves to be,
in comparison to this power, can and does fall to its knees in awe.
Heidegger was understandably impressed by the apparently unspiritual
character of modern science and technology and by the apparent decline, in
modern times, of traditional forms of worship and religious doctrine—the decline
that Nietzsche heralded with his pronouncement that “God is dead.” These are
undoubtedly among the major reasons for Heidegger’s failure to see how deeply
and ubiquitously we are involved, in modern times as much as in other times, with
the Plato/Hegel God, and it with us.

Are we really in a “secular age”?

It seems to me that a major part of what’s going on in the world of “religion”
and “spirituality,” in our time, is a sorting out of the issue of what is genuinely

FULL REALITY IS GOD    99

transcendent. Much conventional religion seems to be stuck in the habit of
conceiving of God as a separate being, despite the fact that when it’s carefully
examined, such a being would be finite and thus wouldn’t really transcend the
world at all. Plus, it’s hard to know how we would know anything about such a
being, which is defined as being both separate from us and inaccessible to our
physical senses. In response to these difficulties, more or less clearly understood,
many people have ceased to believe in such a being and ceased to support whole-
heartedly the institutions that appear to preach such a being. Thus we have the
apparent “secularization” of major parts of (at least) European and North American
societies.
But at the same time, people’s desire to identify and relate to something that’s
truly transcendent seems to be as strong as it has ever been. This could hardly
not be the case if, as I’ve been suggesting, transcendence is an inherent (though
often unrecognized) feature of human thought, freedom, and love, as such. One
of the current manifestations of this perennial interest in transcendence is the
proliferation, in the West, of nontraditional religious or spiritual organizations
and movements, including Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, shamanism, Wicca,
mysticism, “New Age” and Jungian ideas, Romantic poetry and nature writing,
and so forth.12
For those of us who wonder what’s really going on here, it’s very helpful to
know that an important part of the Western spiritual tradition was never, in fact,
committed to the problematic notion of God as a separate being. Plato, Plotinus,
St Paul, St Athanasius, St Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Hegel, Emerson,
Whitman, Whitehead, Tillich, Rahner, and many other poets and thinkers in
all phases of the Western tradition have thought, instead, of something like the
“God within us” that I’ve been outlining here. The notion of God as a separate
being has, of course, been highly visible in public discourse, but if it’s less widely
accepted today, that’s no reason to think that transcendence as such is losing
importance for people. For the nontraditional movements that I mentioned all
embrace transcendence in some form (though not always, of course, by that
name).
Equally important is the seldom-recognized fact that science itself constitutes a
form of transcendence, inasmuch as a person who seeks knowledge seeks, in doing
so, to rise above the sort of existence in which she would be governed merely by
her preexisting appetites and opinions. Thus the age of science is an age that seeks,
as much as any other age does, to transcend. Of course this raises the important
question of how different forms of “transcendence” relate to one another. But at
least it makes it clear that the modern period is as much involved in transcendence,
in general, as any other age has been.
So we don’t have to picture what’s happening in the West as a relentless process
of “secularization,” by which “transcendence” is gradually or rapidly being replaced
by “immanence.” Transcendence has been a feature of every phase of Western

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thought and experience, and it’s just as manifest in the current period as it has ever
been. What’s different is simply that some of its more familiar and institutionalized
advocates appear to be losing influence, partly (I suspect) because the separate
being that they seem to identify with transcendence is rationally inaccessible and
can’t truly transcend.13
Regarding our supposedly “secular age,” Charles Taylor’s influential book, A
Secular Age (2007), seems to me to be excessively preoccupied with the fortunes
of Christian “belief ” (as Taylor calls it), as distinct from transcendence in general,
as, for example, Plato explains it. A decline in “belief ” need not entail a reduced
interest in transcendence as such. Taylor seems insufficiently aware of the critique
of the conception of God as a “separate being,” which is also a critique of much
conventional Christian “belief ” and which was already implicit in Plato, St Paul, St
Augustine, and Meister Eckhart and is explicit in Hegel. Overlooking this Platonic
critique of conventional “belief ” and overlooking the alternative conception of
transcendence that Plato and Hegel develop, Taylor grants more credibility than
I would grant to the claims of what he calls “immanent humanism” to function
without any appeal to transcendence.14

If “humanism” and philosophy engage in

transcendence, are they still “secular”?
“Humanism” certainly refuses to rely on a God who’s conceived as a being
that’s separate from the world, but it seldom says anything about the alternative
conception of transcendence that’s developed in the Platonic tradition. And any
serious attempt, such as “humanism” certainly is, to be guided by truth rather than
by mere opinion and appetite, is itself necessarily engaged, whether it realizes this
or not, in a kind of transcendence. So transcendence is a built-in feature of the
humanism and science that many people take to be opposing transcendence.
We should view references to “secular philosophy” or “secular ethics” with
skepticism for similar reasons.15 If philosophy, as a pursuit of truth, necessarily
involves an important kind of transcendence, is it (in fact) fully “secular”? Were
Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophy or Aristotle’s ethics “secular”?
I don’t think these questions can have clear answers. This is because the term,
“secular”, has a clear application only in our particular historical circumstances,
in the aftermath of the dominance of institutional Christianity in our societies.
Societies in which church institutions lose power can be called more “secular,”
but this implies nothing in particular regarding the prevalence or significance
of transcendence in general, in those societies. The change that has taken place
is primarily sociological, having to do with particular institutions, rather than
metaphysical.

FULL REALITY IS GOD    101

 When we understand this development correctly, we’re also in a better position
to understand the relationship between “Western” thought and non-“Western”
including Asian thought. For we’re able to see forms of transcendence in doctrines
that don’t match up with “theism” as it’s conventionally conceived of.

How mysticism is “perennial”

One doctrine that contrasts with the notion of “secularism” is the idea of a
“perennial philosophy,” which was popularized by various authors including
Aldous Huxley in his classic anthology with commentary, The Perennial Philosophy
(1944). I should explain how the Plato/Hegel philosophical approach to mysticism
and God relates to Huxley’s “perennial philosophy.” Plato and Hegel certainly agree
with Huxley that there is a transcendent truth that’s permanent, regardless of the
comings and goings of particular religious organizations and cultural formations,
each of which reflects only a partial grasp of that truth. So that if one could actually
function without transcendence, as secular humanism often claims to do, one
would deprive oneself of this fundamental truth.
To Huxley’s thesis, R. C. Zaehner, Steven Katz, and other scholars have objected
that since mystical experiences take different forms reflecting particular cultural
traditions and individual psychology, there is no justification for treating them
all as reflecting one uniform transcendent reality. Other writers, in turn, have
responded to Zaehner and Katz.16
Seen in the light of the Plato/Hegel approach, it’s not surprising that what we
call “mystical experiences” take different forms. The specific form that they take
is likely to reflect the individual’s cultural and personal background. But the truth
that underlies these extraordinary “mystical” experiences is not to be found in
these experiences taken by themselves and regarded as extraordinary, but rather
in the everyday experiences of inner freedom, love, forgiveness, and so forth, and
in the reality that they constitute.17
“Mystical experiences” often sum up and comment on this reality, but they do so
in different ways. There is no reason to expect inner freedom as such, love as such,
or the reality that they constitute to vary from culture to culture and individual to
individual in the way that mystical experiences appear to vary. Though no doubt
different cultures and individuals will have different terms with which to describe
them, different theories about them, and likewise different ways of experiencing
them, inner freedom, love, and the transcendent reality that they constitute are
simply themselves.
Mysticism is “perennial” not in that all mystical experiences are necessarily
the same, but in that the reality that underlies them is the same, as we learn
from analyzing everyday human experience and its implications. I’ll say more
in Chapters 8 and 9 about how the study of “mystical” knowledge (i.e., direct

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knowledge of the divine) should be distinguished from the study of extraordinary
“mystical experiences,” as such.

“Monistic” mysticism versus “theistic”

mysticism
Finally, the Plato/Hegel approach offers a novel perspective on a more specific
version of the “perennialism” issue. This is the contrast between “monistic”
experiences, in which one discovers the unity of everything, and “theistic”
experiences, which emphasize an “encounter” between the human mystic and
an independent entity, which is understood to be God. Monistic experiences
include those described by Advaita (“nondual”) Vedanta and certain medieval
Christian mystics such as the Beghards and perhaps Meister Eckhart, while
theistic experiences include those described by Dvaita (“dual”) Vedanta, Jan van
Ruysbroeck, St Teresa of Avila, and St John of the Cross. This contrast between
unity and theistic duality appears to create a major difficulty for the perennialists’
suggestion that all mystical experience ultimately reveals a single, “perennial”
reality.18
As with the diversity of numerous kinds of mystical experience, the notion
that this particular diversity, of monism versus theism, is irreducible is also
undermined by the Plato/Hegel approach. For here too, Plato and Hegel suggest
that the ultimate issue is not some irreducible “experience,” whether monistic,
theistic, or other, but rather whether there is a structure of human experience in
general which constitutes an ultimate reality.
If there is such a structure, it could inform various kinds of “experience” in
various ways, including the “monistic” way and the “theistic” way. “Monistic”
experiences apparently reflect the fact, which Plato and Hegel establish, that the
divine can’t be a “separate being” from the world (because that would make it
finite and thus non-divine). “Theistic” experiences, on the other hand, reflect
the fact, which Plato and Hegel also illuminate, that the divine does in fact often
impinge upon us as though it were a separate being. It does this because our
ordinary conception of ourselves as finite “beings” often causes us to experience
the irruption of infinite freedom and love as coming from a source that’s external
to ourselves, and which we therefore very naturally imagine as a separate being. In
each case, the experience reflects a very real aspect of the ultimate reality, but since
they’re actually only aspects of it, there is no need to regard them as competing
with each other to represent the true divine reality.
That we “imagine” in a certain way what we seem to be encountering need not
imply that we are aware of conjuring up and thus consciously controlling an image.
The “imagining” that comes from sources of which we’re not fully conscious, such

FULL REALITY IS GOD    103

as an encounter with the deep structure of our relation to reality, can have the
character instead of what we call a “vision” or a dream. When suitably interpreted,
as Freud and Jung have shown, a dream can embody a remarkable amount of
truth. A waking “vision,” such as mystics and religious prophets sometimes have,
can embody truth in a similar way—always subject to interpretation and criticism
by conscious thought, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 6. And this interpretation and
criticism will inevitably bring in such independently ascertained facts as the
theological implications, which Plato and Hegel show us, of human experience
in general.

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5 PLATO’S PROGRESS

Fleeing is not a liberation from what is . . . fled from; the one that excludes
still remains connected to what it excludes.
G. W. F. HEGEL, SCIENCE OF LOGIC

Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good

. . . but everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere
belief here.
PLATO, REPUBLIC 505D

Alienating “dualisms” and Plato

I’ve been suggesting all along that the broadly Platonic tradition can help us
to integrate ourselves and be fully free, without “fleeing” from the world and
consequently, as Hegel says, “remaining connected” to it and unfree. But this
claim about the Platonic tradition might seem rather questionable. Plato is often
described as the originator of a “dualism” of soul versus body, in which the body
would be the “enemy” of the soul, and precisely something to “flee” from. How
can the same philosopher who seems to be centrally responsible, through at least
some of his writings, for the highly oppositional tradition of soul/body dualism,
offer us the help that we need in order to avoid what Hegel calls “fleeing [that] is
not a liberation”?
Plato can do this because from the beginning he undermined his own apparent
dualism, seeking to capture what’s true in it without making himself divided and
unfree. In this way, he anticipated the West’s long debates between the dualisms
of the Gnostics, Martin Luther, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, and the early
Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and the more “monistic” but spiritual syntheses of
Plotinus, Erasmus, Spinoza, Hegel, and Whitehead, on the other.
Plato is contested territory
As with Hegel, many people who are aware of Plato have strong opinions about
him. We correctly associate Plato with ideas that are regarded as religious, like
the soul, transcendence, and the like. So people who have had bad experiences
with institutions that call themselves religious may be inclined to take a
jaundiced view of Plato. We also correctly associate Plato with “reason,” of which
some people are very suspicious because reason in the form of modern science
and technology seems to have disenchanted our world and left us with little
room for love, beauty, and the like. When Plato criticizes the arts as promoting
irrationality, this seems to confirm that he has taken the wrong side on this great
issue.
Political battles also come into play, because Plato, in this respect resembling
some modern people who present themselves as religious, had major doubts about
democracy. And so we project our modern political struggles onto Plato and onto
writers who find value in his work.
In the next several chapters, I’ll try to show that Plato in fact embraces all “sides,”
religion and art and reason and also democracy and criticism of democracy, in
a way that’s both intelligible and deeply helpful. Beyond that, I’ll show how the
“rational religion” that Plato outlines is as inspiring as any religion could be, by
virtue of the relationship that Plato uncovers between reason and love. And how
the nondualistic transcendence on which this religion is based can explain, also,
how reason requires justice, how mind relates to body, and how value relates to
“fact.”

Plato’s progress
Let’s begin, then, with the issue of “dualism”—of Plato’s apparent belief that there is
an inherent and inevitable antagonism between “soul” and “body.”
Plato was apparently responding, over the course of his life’s work, to two initial
traumas. He may never have fully worked through them, but he did deal with them
in increasingly adequate ways. The first trauma was the reign of terror conducted
against the Athenian democrats in 404–403 BCE, when Plato was twenty-three
years old, by an aristocratic clique, the “Thirty Tyrants,” who were led by Plato’s
uncle, Critias. The second trauma, five years later in 399 BCE, was Athens’s judicial
execution of Plato’s hero, Socrates, for allegedly “corrupting the youth” of Athens
and not worshipping Athens’s gods.
Conflict between the “aristocrats” of inherited wealth and the ordinary
craftspeople and merchants who formed a majority in Athens’s decision-
making assembly was a chronic feature of Athenian life in the fifth century. It
was driven to a high pitch by the long war between Athens and Sparta which

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was carried on largely by the “democratic” party, initially under the leadership
of Pericles. When Sparta defeated Athens, in 404, Sparta installed the Athenian
aristocrats in power in the city, and the aristocrats seized the opportunity
to settle old scores, brutally. After the “Thirty” fell from power, in 403, the
resurgent democrats wisely enacted an amnesty, so as to avoid an ongoing battle
of tit for tat between the parties. But strong feelings undoubtedly persisted for
a long time thereafter.
Socrates himself wasn’t rich, and he believed in a government of laws and
justice, as opposed to tyranny. So he disapproved (and Plato clearly shared his
disapproval) of the actions of the “Thirty” and refused, at considerable personal
risk, to cooperate with them.
Despite Socrates’s resistance to the “Thirty,” there may have been a connection
between what happened when they were in power and the jury’s conviction of
Socrates, five years later. Many of the jurors may have mistakenly thought of
Socrates as a supporter of the “Thirty,” and harbored negative feelings toward
him for that reason. This is because Socrates’s circle of associates over the years
included quite a few members, such as Plato himself, of the aristocratic families
from which the “Thirty” drew their members.1 In view of this circumstance that is
likely to have contributed to Socrates’s being convicted, it’s quite possible that Plato
may have felt some indirect responsibility, through his family, for Socrates’s death.
What’s certain is that Socrates’s death was a watershed event for Plato. “Socrates”
is the main protagonist, always presented in a very positive light, in the written
dialogues to which Plato devoted many years of work. From them we derive most
of our knowledge of the actual Socrates and of the philosophy that Plato developed
in response to Socrates’s teaching and various other influences.
In the Republic, the character called “Socrates” suggests that ordinary people
would be likely to want to kill a person who had found more truth than they had
found, and who tried to share it with them (517a). This is one of many indications
in the dialogues that Plato was preoccupied, in all of his thinking about politics
and ethics, with the issue of Socrates’s death, and how a society might be created
in which such tragic events wouldn’t occur. It may be easier for us to understand
the quite undemocratic nature of the political institutions that Plato seems to
recommend, if we remember that the Athenian democracy had executed Plato’s
teacher and hero.
In addition to Plato’s thinking about politics, one could easily interpret some of
his best-known ideas about the human “soul,” itself, and its relation to the “body,”
as at least partly a response to his extended trauma. If the soul is separate from the
body and survives it, then Socrates’s soul can be with the immortals, regardless of
what the ignorant Athenians did to his body. In this way, the “dualistic” Plato could
have been Plato’s first, very natural reaction to his trauma.
But other aspects of Plato’s thinking could reflect a realization that his dualism
might not actually give him as much freedom as it seemed to—that “fleeing” might

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not, in fact, make him free. These other aspects of Plato’s thinking are subtle and
aren’t flagged as dramatically as the initial dualism was. So writers who are all
clearly influenced by Plato can nevertheless wind up disagreeing with each other
in major ways on these central issues.
Dualism recurs in the Gnostics, in aspects of Plotinus and Rumi, in Martin
Luther, in Rene Descartes, in Kant’s Critiques, in Schopenhauer, and in
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A nondualistic but still broadly Platonic view appears in
Aristotle, in other aspects of Plotinus and Rumi, in Meister Eckhart, Erasmus,
Spinoza, Hegel, Whitehead, Polanyi, and Rödl.
While Plato gave us what seems to be a powerful statement of dualism, in the
early part of his Phaedo, he also set in motion these nondualistic trains of thought.
He did this first of all through his thinking about reality, the Forms, God, and the
world, which was never really as bluntly dualistic as it sometimes sounds. He did
it also through his systematic study of the intermediate realm, between “body”
and rational “soul,” which we call “emotion.” Plato examines pride, anger, and
especially love and shows us how they all combine bodily aspects and important
“rational” aspects.
Let’s begin with a brief look at his apparent dualism.

Plato the apparent dualist

Plato’s Phaedo concludes with the scene in which Socrates, in prison, says farewell
to his friends and drinks the poison hemlock to which the Athenian court has
condemned him, because he (allegedly) corrupted the youth of Athens and
didn’t worship Athens’s gods. Plato describes Socrates as spending the day of his
execution in a lengthy discussion, with his friends, of the possible immortality of
the individual human soul. The connection of this topic with Socrates’s impending
death is clear to everyone. And Socrates in fact asserts, in the dialogue, that he’s
convinced that souls are immortal, and offers several elaborate arguments in
support of this idea.
In terms of its sheer historical influence, the most important of these
arguments is probably the first major one, in which Socrates appeals to the
existence of what he calls “Forms.” These are (for example) “the Just,” “the
Beautiful,” “the Good,” “Bigness,” “Health,” “Strength”—that is, they are what
just, beautiful, good, big, healthy, or strong things “essentially” are (65d).
These underlying essences can’t be observed directly in particular things in the
world, since those things are only imperfectly just, beautiful, big, and so forth.
So Socrates suggests that our souls must have become acquainted with these
essences when our souls existed apart from the body, before our present lives
(76c). And thus we can know that our souls can and sometimes do exist apart
from our bodies.

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 In connection with this argument, Socrates asserts that philosophers, who
understand these facts, “despise” food, drink, sex, bodily ornaments, and
everything that has to do with the body (64e). They do their best to “flee” from
the body (65d), by purifying the soul of bodily concerns (69c), so as to consort
as much as possible with the bodiless truth that is the Forms. This is the famous
Platonic “asceticism” (or “rampant Platonism,” as John McDowell calls it), which
Friedrich Nietzsche influentially diagnosed as “an expression of hatred for a world
that makes one suffer,” adding that “the ressentiment of metaphysicians is here
creative.”2
It’s easy to suppose that if Plato himself endorsed this version of immortality,
which he conjures up in quite a few places, it must have given him some
consolation for, in particular, the loss of Socrates himself. Socrates’s soul survives,
in the company of the immortals.
However that may be, this passage in the Phaedo has indeed been one of the
great documents of body-rejecting ascetic dualism, inspiring to many people, and
to many others questionable, or itself needing to be rejected. To me its apparent
message is definitely questionable. It seems clear to me that (as Hegel says) “fleeing”
from something doesn’t make you free of it. Instead, fleeing chains you to the thing
from which you flee: it ensures that your functioning will be deeply imprinted by
that thing, and by your relationship to it. To be imprinted in this way may be better
than being uncritically mixed up with the thing, but it’s hardly full freedom, since
it’s not self-determination.
Many of Plato’s modern critics, such as David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and
Bertrand Russell, focus their objections on the soul/body antagonism that we
seem to see in the Phaedo.3 I myself sympathized with their objections for a long
time, for the reason that I just mentioned. Antagonism toward the body seemed
not to be fully free.

Plato the nondual rationalist

But in viewing Plato in this way, the critics and I were overlooking the radical
explanation that Plato begins to articulate in the Phaedo and fills in in more detail
in the Republic and later dialogues. In “fleeing” the body, Plato says, we’re fleeing
something that isn’t fully real! If we understand the diminished reality that Plato
imputes to the body, we’ll see that “flight from” the body is a manner of speaking,
which is better put, in many other contexts in the dialogues, as the pursuit of
what is fully real.4 In which case, the one who pursues would not be imprinted
by the body and entangled with it in the way that we critics have suspected Plato
of being.
I still suspect that Plato’s talk of “fleeing” and “despising” probably betrays an
emotional unfreedom that may have been an important part of his initial response

PLATO’S PROGRESS    109

to the double trauma that I described. I doubt very much that Plato’s extended
study of the emotions was motivated solely by “disinterested” curiosity. He had
had major emotional experiences, including the traumas that I mentioned, and his
analytical thinking about inner freedom, pride, and love must have helped him to
work through these experiences.
But what impresses me now is how early in that process he seems to begin to get
beyond the antagonism that his habitual language still suggests. In the passage in
the Phaedo that has set off warning bells for many readers, Plato’s central concern
is not, in fact, with the negative influence of the body, but rather with the positive
affinity between the soul and the (non-bodily) Forms. In the passage at 65c-d that
describes the soul as “disdaining” and “fleeing” the body, Socrates’s main concern
is with how the soul can gain access to “truth” or “reality.” Suggesting that the
body’s senses deceive the soul and confuse it, he proposes that the soul that is
successful in the search for truth seeks to be “by itself ” (65d), and thus to track
down realities “pure and by themselves” (66a).
Here we might think especially of the search for mathematical truths.
Mathematics was one of Plato’s major interests, and some of his friends were
brilliant mathematicians. In the dialogue called the Meno, Plato’s Socrates has
a discussion with an untutored slave boy from whom he elicits unexpected
understanding of how one could find a square whose area is double that of a
previously given square. (Answer: construct the square on the diagonal of the
initial square.) Socrates suggests that this understanding derives not primarily
from the slave boy’s observation of the particular squares that Socrates draws in
the dust, but rather from the birth of insight, in him, into the reasons why all
squares must obey this general rule.
Through our familiarity with abstract reasoning in mathematics, we’re
accustomed to the idea that (at least) certain kinds of knowledge are based not
on inspecting what we touch or see, as such, but rather on abstract reasoning. No
number of measurements of particular squares can prove that the diagonal of an
initial square will always yield a square with double its area. Only arguments from
(possibly) self-evident axioms can do that. This experience of learning through
mathematical proof is one of the main sources of Plato’s notion that the soul can
indeed usefully be “by itself ” and find realities that don’t depend upon sense
perception.
So Plato’s primary concern in the passage in the Phaedo, with its famous
”despising” and “fleeing” of the body, is not with the body as such but rather with
a kind of functioning, in the “soul,” which seems to be most successful when it
ignores the body. A functioning, as he puts it, of the soul “by itself.” The notorious
language of “despising,” and so forth, is a secondary feature of a train of thought
that’s primarily concerned with something quite different, namely, with the
abstractness that characterizes certain very fruitful kinds of inquiry, and from
which the body’s senses can be a source of distraction.5

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Platonism and “embodied human
experience”
At this point I can imagine someone saying,

But human beings aren’t theorems in mathematics! Surely if we leave behind

sight, touch, hearing, and smell, and the emotions that go with them, we’ll
leave behind concrete human life and wind up with empty abstractions. To call
mathematics and Forms “more real” than the human experience of embodiment
is impossibly paradoxical. My bodily experience is my paradigm of what’s real.
I can’t imagine how someone could seriously propose that something else is
more real than it.

Plato’s most effective single response to this kind of objection is contained in a

passage in book vi of the Republic whose full importance isn’t often recognized. The
passage culminates in the statement that I quoted in the epigraph of this chapter:
“Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good . . . but
everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here” (505d).
To explain how this dictum speaks to the issue of “reality” and bodily experience,
I need to outline its context, which is a discussion that begins in Plato’s account of
the three “parts of the soul,” in book iv.6 There, Socrates describes how we make
up our minds about what to do. We experience “appetites,” such as thirst, that urge
courses of action, such as drinking. But sometimes we also experience the thought
that we should resist the appetite, and not do what it urges. For example, that we
shouldn’t drink what’s in front of us, because it will harm us in some way. This
familiar experience, Socrates says, shows that the soul has at least two different
parts: the appetites, on the one hand, and the “reasoning” part, on the other. The
conflict that we experience is the evidence that these are different parts.
Socrates goes on to identify a third part of the soul, as well: the part that gets angry
when someone mistreats us or when we mistreat ourselves. In Socrates’s striking
example, a man named Leontius feels a desire to look at some recently executed
corpses, but is also angry at himself for giving in to this ignoble desire. This shows,
Socrates says, that besides the appetites and the reasoning part, our souls also have a
“spirited” part (thumos, in Greek), which gets indignant at actions that it regards as
incompatible with the person’s dignity. The spirited part is obviously different from the
appetites, which inspire these actions, but it’s also different from the reasoning part,
because sometimes we feel anger at things that our reasoning part eventually says are
okay. The spirited part claims to speak on behalf of reason, as opposed to appetites like
Leontius’s desire to look at the corpses; but because the spirited part is emotional and
hasty, it doesn’t always accurately reflect what reason will eventually conclude.
What I want to examine now is the conflict between appetite and the rational
part. What Plato has Socrates say about it may not seem very controversial. So

PLATO’S PROGRESS    111

it’s important to remember that influential thinkers have in fact suggested that
when reason appears to be coming into conflict with an appetite, all that’s really
happening is that one appetite is coming into conflict with another. Our appetite for
a drink is coming into conflict, say, with our appetite for other satisfactions that
we won’t be able to enjoy if the drink that’s in front of us turns out to be poisonous
and we don’t live long enough to satisfy the other appetites. This is the view of
Epicurus, in ancient Greece, of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Britain, and of perhaps all twentieth-century materialists,
naturalists, empiricists, and positivists.
If what we call “reasoning” were really just weighing one appetite against others
and figuring out which appetite or group of appetites is the strongest, then the
inner conflict that Plato describes would simply be a competition among the parts
of the appetitive part, to see which one is stronger. It wouldn’t be a negotiation
between the appetitive part and something outside it. Then our situation would
be one in which, as David Hume put it, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave
of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them,” by figuring out how to get what our appetites want.7
We need to examine this view carefully, because it’s extremely influential in our
own time, especially among social scientists. When the Harvard psychologist, B.
F. Skinner compared human behavior to rat behavior, he assumed that neither the
rats nor the humans go beyond the kind of competition among appetites, to see
which appetite is the strongest, that Epicurus and Hume take to be going on in
us.8 The “cognitive scientists” who have recently criticized Skinner’s “behaviorism”
for its excessive skepticism about the existence of “inner” mental mechanisms,
don’t seem to differ importantly from Skinner, Epicurus, and Hume about the role
of reason in our practical decision-making. And when economists and political
scientists describe us as acting to satisfy our “preferences,” they employ a similar
conception of human decision-making.
In none of these models does “reason” get any role other than figuring out which
appetite or preference is stronger, and how to satisfy the stronger one, or a mixture
of the two which reflects their relative strengths. Something like this is widely
thought to be the only “scientific” view of human decision-making, and people
who see the matter in this way are likely to regard “idealists” or “rationalists,” who
disagree with this sort of view, as unscientific wishful thinkers. But in the passage
that I quoted from Republic book vi, Plato aims to show that however widespread
this “naturalist” or “empiricist” view may be, it nevertheless is mistaken.

Questioning and what’s really good

In the case of just and beautiful things, many people are content with what
are believed to be so, even if they aren’t really so. [But] nobody is satisfied to

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 acquire things that are merely believed to be good . . . everyone wants the things
that really are good and disdains mere belief here. (Republic 505d)

Here Socrates is saying that regarding the things, experiences, relationships, and
so forth, that we get for ourselves, we want to be sure that they really are good,
rather than just being what we, or other people, think is good. We don’t want to
live in a “fool’s paradise,” thinking that we’re experiencing what’s really good, when
in fact it isn’t really good.
Even if we could be sure that we would remain in this fool’s paradise for our
entire lives, and never find out that we had been mistaken, we hate the thought
that that might be the case—that what we take to be really good might not really be
good. If that were the case, we feel, our lives would have been wasted, whether or
not we ever found out that they were wasted. We can joke about how other people
are “blissfully ignorant,” but I have yet to meet a person who says that she would
choose to have less information about what’s really good, if by doing so she could
be sure of getting lots of what she currently thinks is good. The notion of choice,
itself, seems to be oriented toward finding out (if possible) what’s really good,
rather than just being guided by one’s current desires or one’s current opinions
about what’s good.
As applied to Skinner’s view of human motivation, and other naturalist or
empiricist views, what Socrates’s response says is that since we want what’s
really good, what we feel drawn to right now isn’t the final word regarding
what we really want. Because if we came to the conclusion that what we feel
drawn to right now wasn’t really good, we would stop wanting it, or at least
stop wanting it wholeheartedly, and start wanting what we had concluded was
really good.
That is, we humans are able to question our wants and our appetites and resist
them or revise them or work around them when we conclude that they are ill-
informed or mistaken. No doubt some of our wants, such as for things that we’re
addicted to, will be difficult to resist. But nobody doubts that we can sometimes
do things that will at least reduce the likelihood that we’ll act on wants that we’ve
concluded were mistaken.
This ability to question what we feel drawn to right now, and to draw practical
consequences from this questioning, is not something that naturalist or empiricist
views take adequately into account. Their advocates try to describe the experience
of questioning as just another case of conflict between wants and appetites. When
I question whether the drink that’s in front of me will be good for me, they say,
what I’m really doing is asking whether I have other wants that will be frustrated
if I drink the drink, such as wanting to see the sun rise tomorrow, or whatever
it might be. But Plato’s response is that I can question any and all of my wants,
including my wanting to see the sun rise tomorrow, by asking whether it will really
be good for me to satisfy these wants.

PLATO’S PROGRESS    113

 We may well wonder how we could answer questions like these. If we question
all of our wants at once, what standard will be left, by reference to which we can
answer all of these innumerable questions? Is this project of unlimited questioning,
a project that we can actually afford to embark upon? As B. F. Skinner complained,
“The disputing of values . . . is interminable.”9 But regardless of how difficult it may
be to implement it in practice, Plato’s initial point seems like a strong one. We need
to raise these questions because we want to wind up with what’s really good, and
not just what we currently feel drawn to as a result of what we ate for breakfast this
morning, or what our parents told us is good, or what evolution has wired us to
want.

Contradictions in naturalism
The naturalist or empiricist view seems to say: Shut up and do what your breakfast
or your parents or your evolutionary history has wired you to do! But if I’m a
serious person and I’m deciding (for example) how to spend my life, I’m not going
to find the naturalist’s or empiricist’s advice very attractive. I want a life that’s really
good for me, not just a life that I’m wired to live. As long as there is hope of finding
out what’s really good, that’s what I’m going to want to do.10
Rats, I suppose, can’t ask questions like these, and thus can’t get into the kind
of quandary of which the history of philosophy and religion is certainly full. But
as long as it seems that I can ask this kind of question, it seems that I ought to,
because if I don’t ask it, I’m only half alive.
In fact, if the naturalist or empiricist actually said that I should stop trying to
ask this kind of question, and just be satisfied with what I’m wired to do, they
wouldn’t just be telling me what I’m wired to do. For if I were just plain wired to
do it, they wouldn’t have to urge me to do it. Rather, in telling me to stop asking
questions they would be telling me what I really ought to do or what it would be
best for me to do, and thus conceding by their actions that these are important
things to think about and discuss.
When a naturalist or empiricist becomes involved in public controversy about
matters of value, she should be embarrassed, since according to her theory that
reason “is and ought to be the slave of the passions,” there is no rational way to
settle such a controversy. But in fact, the issue with naturalism isn’t just about what
we should really do but also about what we should really believe. If reason “ought
to be the slave of the passions,” this will apply just as much to belief as to anything
else, and we will no longer be able to say that we ought to believe what has been
tested by science, as opposed to whatever just pops into our heads. A thorough-
going naturalist can’t tell us that we “ought” to proceed differently in the case of
science than we do in the case of life-planning and ethics. It will all depend upon
what our “passions” happen to be.

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 In this way it’s hard to see how one can consistently take Hume’s naturalistic line
that reason ought to be the slave of the passions, while maintaining, as most self-
described naturalists do, that we rationally ought to give authority in our lives to
science rather than superstition. Plato’s analysis of the soul speaks to this practical
contradiction in naturalism. Plato concludes from what we’ve observed about our
attitudes toward science and toward what’s really good, that regardless of what we
may say, we don’t really believe that reason ought to be the slave of the passions.
Rather, the “reasoning part” of the soul has an independent role to play, which is
to question everything that we’re currently inclined to want and to believe, so as to
get behind it, to what’s really good and what’s really true.
How exactly such “reasoning” will operate remains to be seen. My point is
simply that Plato seems to have given us a good reason to take the “reasoning
part” seriously, as something with its own distinctive role to play, rather than as a
mere slave of the passions.

Questioning and the existence of Forms

In fact, we might take this account of the soul’s investment in seeking what’s really
good and really true as one of Plato’s major reasons for taking seriously his notion
of Forms that have a reality that can’t be reduced to what we can experience with
our five senses. In mathematics, we persist in thinking that the diagonal of a given
square will yield a square with twice the area in every case, and not just in the
squares that we have measured or will measure. And in conducting our lives, Plato
suggests in Republic 505d, we persist in thinking that what’s really good need not
be reducible to what we will ever want, or believe is good. In both cases, we want
what’s really true, rather than just what seems on the basis of our present or future
sense experience or beliefs to be true.
That we want this is one of Plato’s strongest arguments for his proposition that
there is in fact a truth, the Forms, that isn’t reducible to sense experience. Perhaps
it could be the case that this “want” is chimerical, that what we want doesn’t in fact
exist. But Plato is pointing out that a major part of our mental activity presupposes
that this truth that we want does exist, in the case of our life conduct just as much
as in the case of mathematics.

The Forms as “more real”

Plato repeatedly tells us that the Forms are “more real” than what we experience
with our senses.11 We can see now what he might mean by this. The Forms are the
truth, about mathematical objects, about what’s good, and about other objects as
well. What we experience with our senses may be responsive to this truth, or it may

PLATO’S PROGRESS    115

not. To the extent that it’s responsive to this truth, it’s really real, and to the extent
that it isn’t responsive, it isn’t really real, though in both cases it equally exists.
By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is
not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality”
that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not
what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose
that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is
in our experience of ourselves.
In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different “parts of the soul” leads
him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one,
and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being
governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person
who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things
he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act.
(443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together
his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I
put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not
merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person
who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite
is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than
anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts
purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s
genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting
“becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that
can appropriately be called “himself.”
In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of
reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before,
because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not
integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who
merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as
himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.
We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind,
or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these
periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as
ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things
are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves
are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

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 Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully
integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than
rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus
they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more
effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re
more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s
the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?
Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses
allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that
plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than
plants are, and thus more real as themselves.
Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than
many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good,
rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their
environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking
pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than
is present without them.12
Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater
reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge
of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the
soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment
of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what
enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present,
fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our
being fully real, as ourselves.
But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be
at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because
we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are
guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we
are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus
aren’t real as themselves.
This, then, is how Plato can seriously propose that something is more real
than the human embodiment that we think of as paradigmatically real. Human
embodiment is certainly real in the sense that it’s not (on the whole) illusory. But
it’s not real in the sense of being fully itself, or making itself what it is. It depends
upon many other things to make it what it is. Whereas what is “itself ” and is
“by itself,” as Socrates puts it at Phaedo 65d, does not depend upon other things
to make it what it is. It’s real as itself, self-determining, self-contained. It’s not
surprising that Plato took this, rather than the mere absence of illusion, as his
paradigm of full reality, and described it in the Republic as a human being’s highest
accomplishment.14

PLATO’S PROGRESS    117

Contra Vlastos and Bröcker
Gregory Vlastos discussed Plato’s “degrees of reality” view in two papers,
“Metaphysical Paradox” and “Degrees of Reality,” reprinted in Vlastos (1973 and
1981). In the first paper, he says that “in vision of Form, Plato discovers . . . his
own personal bridge from [time as a state of bondage] to [time under the aspect
of eternity, regeneration] via [eternity, the blessedness of release].” (I combine two
sentences of which Vlastos confusingly indexes one to the other.) “How natural
then for [Plato] to say that the eternal things, the Forms, are the ‘really real’ ones. In
seeing [the Forms,] a creature of time touches eternity.” Vlastos calls the resulting
“restructuring of what there is on the scaffolding of what is more and less real . . .
one of Plato’s greatest achievements, perhaps his greatest,” but adds that Plato
should have acknowledged that it was “a personal vision for which demonstrative
certainty cannot be claimed” (pp. 55–56; emphasis added).
I would suggest that the way the Republic connects the vision of Forms with
inner freedom and unity makes Plato’s view much less of an optional “personal
vision” than Vlastos takes it to be. For inner freedom and unity are sought, in
one way or another, by all of us, and thus insofar as the vision of Forms is a
precondition of inner freedom and unity, we all seek the vision of Forms as well.15
If inner freedom and unity aren’t optional, then the vision of Forms isn’t optional
either.
So when Walter Bröcker wrote in his critique of Plato and Hegel that Plato’s
introduction of degrees of reality was “an act of compensation” for the “removal of
gods from the world of the senses by the thinking of the ‘natural philosophers’” who
preceded him ([1959], p. 425; my translation), Bröcker overlooked an important
alternative explanation. Namely, that Plato was identifying a vertical dimension
in the human experience of reality which had given the traditional gods their
plausibility in the first place, and which the natural philosophers hadn’t gotten into
focus. Plato and Hegel do indeed have a good reason “to grant what is thinkable
a higher rank than what is perceivable” (Bröcker, p. 424), which is that more than
perception, thinking enables the thinker to be herself, and (in that sense) more
real than what doesn’t think. So that thinking gives the world as a whole a higher
degree of reality as itself than it would otherwise possess.

Reality as a vertical dimension

In modern times most of us have become accustomed to understanding “reality”
simply as a uniform, horizontal plane, as (so to speak) a standard minimum
endowment. This is in contrast to Plato and those who follow him who see reality
as having an essential vertical dimension, a hierarchy of gradations, whereby some
things are more successful in being themselves and in that sense they’re more

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fully real than others.16 This view of reality is more plausible when we see how it
corresponds to an understanding of ourselves which recognizes how we can and
often do fail to be fully in charge of our lives, fail to “be ourselves,” and fail (in that
sense) to be real, as ourselves.
When we consider how various kinds of living beings achieve lesser and greater
degrees of self-government and (thus) lesser and greater degrees of reality “as
themselves,” we can begin to see that “reality” isn’t merely a standard minimum
endowment. Rather, it exhibits a hierarchy of lesser and greater degrees of what we
might call “realization.”17
This fundamental recognition is expressed in various ways in the world’s
religions and systems of metaphysics. Once one appreciates the experience that
underlies and motivates this way of seeing the world, one can hardly dismiss it as
mere anthropocentric illusion. For it doesn’t focus merely on human beings. It’s
entirely ready to acknowledge that other living things may exhibit the same self-
government as humans, and perhaps forms of self-government that we humans
can barely imagine. And it traces a hierarchy of self-government in “lower” forms
of life with which we still have a great deal in common.
To say, as enthusiasts of Darwinian biology sometimes do, that humans are
“merely” the tools of (say) their genes in an endless struggle for survival is to
ignore the hierarchy of degrees of self-government that life has achieved. Which
is a hierarchy that is exhibited by the very pursuit of truth in whose name the
Darwinist speaks. For rather than viewing his way of understanding life as
something that merely increases the survival chances of his genes, the Darwinist
clearly views it and expects us to be interested in it as something that may be
objectively true.
We want to be guided by reality, in our lives, whether or not that guidance
increases the survival chances of our genes. Being guided by reality means not
being guided merely by our desires or illusions, which are, in general, things that
we’re “subjected to” by forces that we don’t understand or control. Whereas the
thinking by means of which we determine what’s truly real is something that we
seem to be able, to a significant degree, to understand and control. If it’s true that
we have such control, then our thinking expresses not just what we’re subjected to
but us. And thus our success in tracking what’s truly real expresses us.
It’s possible, in some sense, that we don’t have any real control over our thinking.
That would be the scenario of the extremest skepticism. But it’s not a scenario that
we can usefully discuss, because the conduct of such a discussion, like the conduct
of any serious attempt to determine what’s true, presupposes that we do have
control over our thinking. We can’t assert that our current discussion or thinking
isn’t under our control, without bringing it, effectively, to a grinding halt.
But controlling our own thinking, rather than letting it be a mere response
to external inputs, is a form of self-government. Science is a prime example of
disciplined, self-controlled thinking, and therefore of self-government. So we

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must assume that science’s pursuit of objective truth is itself an instance of the
ascent to a higher degree of self-government, and thus to a higher degree of reality
as oneself, to which Plato and his followers are drawing our attention. Science, as
I’ve said, is itself a project of transcendence.
And so is any other form of disciplined thinking, such as thinking about what’s
really Good. It’s unfortunate that few present-day accounts of Platonism bring out
the way in which Platonism’s “vertical” hierarchy of increasing reality corresponds
to our personal pursuit of greater self-government and thus of greater reality as
ourselves. Drawing on his very plausible point that we want what’s really good, in
our lives, rather than merely whatever we currently feel or think is good, Plato’s
account of our greater self-government makes it clear why he attaches such great
significance to the Forms, and the Form of the Good in particular. These are not
only key ingredients in our understanding of the world and ourselves through
mathematics, science, and value-inquiry, they are also key ingredients, thereby, in
our effort to be fully real, as ourselves.
Two interpreters of Plato’s metaphysics from whom I have learned a great deal, J.
N. Findlay and Lloyd Gerson, exhibit the common weakness that they don’t make
it clear why an uncommitted bystander should take seriously Plato’s claim that the
Forms are more real than our human embodiment. Findlay suggests that one’s
attitude on this subject may be a matter of temperament or social contingency.18
Gerson too refers to temperament, saying that “someone who unreservedly
recognizes himself as ideally a thinker is probably the only plausible candidate
for the sort of self-transformation Plato recommends. . . . The rarity of the true
philosophical temperament, as Plato understands that, is hardly in doubt.”19
Whereas it seems to me that Plato provides considerations, in his account
of the soul’s self-government, that will speak to any thoughtful person. I’ve just
shown how something like Plato’s account of the soul’s self-government seems
to be presupposed by any serious discussion about what’s objectively true about
the world. It may be true that people who are “unreservedly” committed to this
goal at any given time are rare, but it seems to me that most people experience
its attraction quite frequently, and in that sense we are all candidates for the self-
transformation that Plato recommends.

No need for ressentiment

So, as I suggested earlier, the vertical dimension that Plato sees in reality needn’t
reflect any negative feelings about the body or the physical world as such. It simply
reflects the insight that a person who is guided by her five senses and her felt
desires and opinions rather than being guided by thought is guided by external
inputs of one kind or another rather than by herself, and thus fails to be fully
herself and fully real, as herself.

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 I quoted above Nietzsche’s famous remark from The Will to Power about the
metaphysicians’ ressentiment. Bertrand Russell, quoting George Santayana, made
a similar accusation against “the great philosophers who were mystics”: that they
were “‘malicious’ in regard to the world of science and common sense.”20 In The
Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum also endorsed Nietzsche’s “deep and no
doubt correct insight into a part of the appeal of Plato’s arguments,” the insight
that the Platonic “ascent” is motivated by ressentiment.21 In her later Upheavals
of Thought, Nussbaum similarly insisted that Plato’s “ascent strategy” in the
Symposium is “a therapeutic program undertaken for reasons of health, because
the strains of ordinary eros are too costly.”22
In opposition to all of these allegations, I suggest that our wanting “the things
that really are good” (Republic 505d), and thus to function fully as ourselves,
is a sufficient explanation of the ascent in both dialogues, the Republic and the
Symposium. (I’ll discuss the Symposium’s account of eros in Chapter 7.) These
“masters of suspicion,” Nietzsche, Santayana, Russell, and Nussbaum, who seek
to liberate us from the illusions of idealism, have in fact obscured what idealism
is about.
The general issue of the contribution that thought and “ideas” can make to what
we succeed in being, and thus to what the world as a whole succeeds in being, has
unfortunately been the subject of widespread confusion since at least the nineteenth
century. That what we succeed in being might contribute something to what the
world as a whole succeeds in being, is no longer a familiar thought. Probably
because intellect has come to be associated almost exclusively with science and
technology, our understanding of its role in our life as a whole has been reduced to
a stock of stereotypical and unrealistic images. We have, for example, the “rational
man” who has no emotions, the “intellectual” who is preoccupied with ideas at the
expense of actually living life, the “romantic” who has no interest in reason, and
the “existentialist” who pursues projects that come out of the blue.
Recent instances of this “existentialist” theme are Bernard Williams’s
hypostatizing of what he calls “ground projects” in Williams (1986), and Richard
Rorty’s proposal to “substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking and
of social progress” in Rorty (1989) (p. xiii). Earlier instances are to be found in
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Andre Gide. These writers are all centrally concerned
with the goal of “being oneself ” or being free, but none of them seem to appreciate
what Plato, Plotinus, Kant, and Hegel have to say on this subject. According to
them, thought that seeks truth and thus is less at the mercy of external influences
than other human functions are is consequently more free and more truly one’s
“own” and thus is the primary route to being truly oneself and free. That is, the
pursuit of Truth is the primary route to real Freedom.
Plato isn’t looking for people who have no emotions, or who are preoccupied
with what we call “ideas,” and he’s certainly not looking for people who have no
interest in reason or whose projects come out of the blue. Following Socrates’s

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principle that the unexamined life is not worth living (Apology of Socrates 38a),
Plato is looking for people whose dominant concerns don’t obviously stem
from some unexamined external influence. So that their lives may express in an
important way themselves, their own processing, as distinct from their antecedents
and environment.
“Obey thyself,” as Emerson says. The vertical ascent is the dimension of
oneself, of one’s own processing. It may not be easy to define precisely what this
processing consists in. But everyone knows in practice the difference between
simply acting on an appetite, an emotion, or a bright idea, or considering it
with an uncommitted, open mind, so that one’s eventual decision is “all things
considered.” This difference is what Platonism is about, and it’s what makes us
fully real, as ourselves.
By focusing on what’s needed in order for us to be fully real, as ourselves,
Platonism shows us something crucial about reality in general which is ignored
by accounts of reality which address only what’s “out there,” separate from the
observing self. The crucial thing that such accounts ignore is the way in which an
observing, thinking, and evaluating self enables a reality to govern itself and thus
(as we say) to “be itself,” rather than just being the effect of its antecedents and
environment. The self ’s attention to itself, in Platonism, is not mere “navel-gazing,”
as “practical” thinking might suspect. It brings to light a dimension of the physical
universe, namely, its ability to achieve true self-government, which we can easily
overlook when we’re engaged in our necessary efforts to understand and control
what’s “out there,” separate from ourselves.
The way in which the “self ” or subject contributes to the physical universe’s
achievement of reality “as itself ” is the aspect of Platonism that’s spelled out most
explicitly by German Idealism, and especially by Hegel in his study of how, as he
puts it, “substance is essentially subject.”23 Students of Platonism who appreciate
the German Idealists may pick up important aspects of Plato that others might
miss.
When Eric Perl, for example, asserts as a fundamental principle for Plato
that “the intellect by nature demands to see goodness in its object in order to
understand, to make sense of it,” I imagine that many admirers of natural science
would probably dismiss this statement as simple dogmatism.24 Whereas when
Plato himself states (in Phaedo 99c, which Perl quotes here) that those who give
merely mechanical accounts of nature “think that, truly, the good and the right do
not bind and hold anything together,” Plato alludes to the phenomenon that he
explores in detail in Republic books iv-vii: that an interest in the Good can “bind
something together” in the clear sense that it enables that thing to be guided by its
own thinking and not merely by external inputs.25 Having thus identified a higher
degree of reality, reality as itself, Plato like Aristotle and Hegel can then quite
reasonably understand other forms of life as approximating in varying degrees to
this higher degree of reality.

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How knowledge in the strongest sense
is knowledge of self
Taking the reality that’s real “as itself ” as the paradigm of full reality, Plato takes
our knowledge of this kind of reality as the paradigm, also, of knowledge. The
Forms, especially the Form of the Good but also the subordinate Forms, which
enable things to be real as themselves by having a definite identity (“Square,” “Tree,”
“Human Being,” and so forth), are therefore the proper objects of knowledge.
Particular sense experiences convey knowledge only insofar as they have to do
with a Form or Forms, and (to that extent) with a self-determining, self-governing
reality.
During the first half of the twentieth century, an empiricist position was
influential in Anglophone philosophy (Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer) according
to which knowledge is constructed out of “sense-data,” which are how the world
affects us through our five senses. Criticism of this notion by philosophers including
W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars eventually made it clear that excitations of
sense organs, as such, contain no knowledge, because no quantity of sense organ
excitations, as such, would be sufficient to say something about the world.26 As
Sebastian Rödl points out,

When I say “This is an apple” and only see the front of the apple, then what I
say goes beyond what I see. It includes the back, which I do not see. Therefore
it is possible that I walk around the ostensible apple and discover that there
is no apple. Now, no sum of perceptions can exclude that later perceptions
will show that despite appearances there is no apple. Like a general judgment,
the judgment “There is an apple” goes beyond everything that we will ever
have perceived. . . . If what is sensibly given in itself falls under the category
of substance . . . then empirical knowledge always already contains general
knowledge, which therefore is not inferred inductively from the former. (Rödl
[2012], pp. 12–13)

The category of “substance” (ousia, “being”) can’t be based on sense perception

alone. Like “Square,” “Tree,” “Human Being,” and “Apple,” the concept of a
“Substance” can’t be reduced to any number of actual or possible sense perceptions.
This is the same point that I made above about mathematics: There is something at
work here that can’t be reduced to sensations. This is one important consideration
that led Plato to his notion of “Forms.”
But in placing the Form of the Good above all other Forms (Republic 509b),
Plato had an additional consideration in mind, namely, that humans, apples, and
other substances can be more or less successful in being the substances that they
are. For we humans, at any rate, pursue the Good more at some times than we

PLATO’S PROGRESS    123

do at other times. Insofar as we do this, we’re more “ourselves” and more human,
by fulfilling human capacities, at some times than at others. There is thus a scale
of degrees of reality, degrees of embodiment of the relevant Form, at least in
ourselves. And in this way we can see that the Forms play a guiding role in a world
that follows them to some degree, and to some degree fails to follow them.
Plus, as before, we can interpret the hierarchy of life, from plant to human, as
fulfilling in lesser and greater degrees the Form of the Good and thus the Form (as
it were) of self-determination, of being fully oneself. Of course from a mechanistic
point of view, such an interpretation of life would be highly suspicious. But when
one has seen the Good’s relevance, in the human case, to self-determination and
thus to being real as oneself, nothing is more natural than to extend this thought to
life as a whole. (I’ll say more about this “teleological” view of reality in Chapter 8.)
Our acquaintance with cases in which we seem to lack interest in the Good
and with cases in which the world seems to lack interest in the Good are then
something less than full “knowledge,” since their object isn’t what’s fully real. Full
knowledge is only of what’s fully real, by being real as itself.
Of course, the issue isn’t about how the word “knowledge” should be used.
The issue is about what we should recognize as most real, and about our access
to that. When we recognize a vertical dimension and a “higher,” more fully “real”
world within the familiar world, words like “reality” and “knowledge” take on a
stronger meaning than they have in the “flat” world that we moderns normally
think we inhabit. And since our experience of ourselves is a primary instance
of this higher reality, our ability to know it is assured. We know it, as I’ve said,
“from inside.”27

Hans Blumenberg’s critique of Plato’s

conception of knowledge
The account of Plato’s conception of knowledge that I’ve been outlining enables us
to reply to Hans Blumenberg’s skeptical suggestion that Plato’s conception imposes
an “excessive demand” on us.28 We can reply that what Plato “demands” is simply
what follows from our interest in being in charge of our own lives, so that it’s
difficult to imagine a self-conscious life that doesn’t seek to meet Plato’s demand
in some way. The fundamental question isn’t, as Blumenberg suggests, the question
whether humans are constitutionally “poor” or, alternatively, “rich”29 through access
to definitive “evidentness.”30 Our actual “riches,” this much is evident to us, are in
our capacity to be in charge of our lives by seeking what’s true and what’s truly good.
This is the crucial Platonic claim, which underlies and motivates “Ur-Platonism’s”
rejection of doctrines such as materialism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism,
which make it difficult to see how we could be in charge of our lives.31

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 Blumenberg’s extensive discussion in his Höhlenausgänge (1996), Part II, of
Plato’s image of the exit from the cave doesn’t mention Plato’s premise, articulated
in Republic book iv, that “everyone wants the things that really are good and
disdains mere belief here” (505e). Which is clearly the motive for ascent from the
shadow world to the higher realities. Nor does Blumenberg refer to Plato’s theme
of the unification of the soul (443e), and how ascent, through this unification,
enables the soul to be self-governing rather than governed by what’s other than
itself. Blumenberg understands Plato’s “parts of the soul” only in terms of hierarchy
(Höhlenausgänge [1996], p. 123), and not in terms of the soul’s potential for unity
and, thus, self-government.
Failing to notice these Platonic connections (that we want what really is good,
and that by pursuing it we can be self-governing and whole), Blumenberg comes
to the drastic conclusion that Plato recognized that he would have to use force to
motivate anyone to leave the shadow world (pp. 87–89, 751). Blumenberg doesn’t
consider the possibility that Plato’s references to force and compulsion (515c) are
not meant to imply that we have no motive to leave the cave, but rather that the
motive that we do have has to overcome our powerful habitual attachment to
appetites, opinions, and self-importance, which are represented by the shadows
on the wall of the cave. I’ll say more about this struggle later in this chapter and
in the next chapter. It’s the “identity crisis” that I’ve been talking about all along,
and which Blumenberg like many post-Hegel philosophers does not get into focus.
Blumenberg also does not consider the possible relevance of Plato’s images
of “birth in beauty” (Symposium 206c-e) and of Socrates as midwife (Theaetetus
150b), which together with the principle that “everyone wants the things that really
are good” suggest ways in which departure from the shadow world might be more
internally motivated than it appears in Republic vii. I’ll discuss these other images
in Chapters 7 and 8. A more comprehensive account of Plato’s texts can help us to
avoid being misled by peculiarities of his presentation in the Republic.
Blumenberg’s drastic conclusion, resulting from his neglect of Plato’s principle
and of texts outside the Republic, limits what he can accomplish in what is
otherwise a uniquely wide-ranging and perceptive account of “exits from the cave”
in Western philosophy and culture.

This knowledge subsumes body

within soul
By showing us how the soul that unifies itself by seeking truth and the truly good
is more fully itself and (in that sense) more fully real than what’s governed merely
by its relations to its antecedents and environment, Plato shows us how bodily
mechanisms can’t claim to be the fullest reality. He spells this out in the passage

PLATO’S PROGRESS    125

in the Phaedo about how the truly good “binds and holds” things together. There
Socrates objects to Anaxagoras’s apparent materialism, in which he

made no use of Mind, nor gave it any responsibility for the management
of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other
strange things. That seemed to me much like [saying] that the reason that I am
sitting here is because my body consists of bones and sinews, [and neglecting]
to mention the true causes, that, after the Athenians decided it was better to
condemn me, for this reason it seemed best to me to sit here and more right
to remain and to endure whatever penalty they ordered. . . . Imagine not being
able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not
be able to act as a cause. . . . [They] do not believe that the truly good and
“binding” binds and holds them together. (98b-99c)

Plato’s point is that when we see how the pursuit of the Good unifies Socrates as
a self-governing agent, we can no longer see air and ether and bones and sinews
as the determining realities here. (The same thought would apply, in our day,
to hormones, neurons, neurotransmitters, and so forth.) Rather, these material
mechanisms are subsumed in a higher unity that’s more real insofar as it’s more
self-governing.
In this way, the doctrine of a dimension of lesser and greater degrees of reality
shows us how to escape the perennial debates between materialism and mind/body
dualism, both of which fail to see how a more self-governing whole both includes
and surpasses material mechanisms. Tying the philosophy of mind together with
the philosophy of will and freedom, Plato’s doctrine of degrees of reality points to a
single underlying issue that generates most of our ongoing confusion in these areas.
This notion of the self-governing higher degree of reality, which is adumbrated
here in the Phaedo and elaborated in Republic books iv-vi, puts in a different
light both the Phaedo’s earlier remarks about “despising” bodily pleasures and
adornments and Plato’s various quasi-mythical stories about the soul’s non-bodily
itinerary (Phaedo 107–114; Republic 514–517, 614–621). We have good reason to
think of the soul as more real than the body, insofar as it’s more self-governing
and thus more real as itself. And as a result it can be appropriate to think of
the soul as making “journeys” that the body, as such, can’t make—journeys, in
particular, toward greater self-understanding and corresponding self-government:
as in the “hero’s journey” and the “soul’s journey to God.” But these should not
be understood as taking place in a space that resembles the one in which bodily
journeys take place. They are allegories—“stories,” as Plato says. The “distance”
that is covered in these stories, and their other features, represent inner processes
of learning and thus becoming more real. Through his account of the “higher”
dimension of self-government, Plato opens up what we’ve subsequently come to
describe as the “inner” world of thought, self-discovery, and the divine.

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Higher degree of reality is a simpler
solution than Heidegger’s
In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953/1961), Martin Heidegger tells us that it
was common in his day to contrast Platonic “idealism” with Aristotelian “realism,”
and to describe Parmenides’s Fragment 5 (sic) (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai
[“for the same thing can be thought as can be”]) as having the result, also thought
to be operative in German Idealism, that “everything becomes subjective. Nothing
is in itself ” (p. 115).32 Heidegger himself thought he saw an early instance of this
kind of “subjectivity” in Plato’s notion of the true as idea, Form or “idea” (pp.
150–53), so that Plato was already putting us on the “idealism”/“realism” seesaw by
which modern philosophy has been plagued. And Heidegger consequently tried
at some length to show how we could avoid that seesaw by developing a more
“authentic” understanding (p. 116) of Parmenides’s principle than Plato possessed.
However, Heidegger didn’t notice how the ascent to “ideas,” in Plato, enables
the “subject” to be self-governing and thus real as itself, so that Platonic “idealism”
precisely does not render everything “subjective” in contrast to “objective,” but
rather shows how the subject can surpass that contrast by achieving a kind of
reality (namely, self-government and the resulting reality “as itself ”) that “objects,”
taken merely as such, can’t possess. It’s not difficult to interpret Parmenides’s
principle as suggesting something like this, if by “einai” in it we understand the
full reality of what is real as itself.
Proceeding in this way, Plato (and Hegel too, following Plato) surpassed the
contrast of “subject” with “object” in which, as Heidegger correctly observed,
much modern philosophy is chronically entangled. And they did so without
having to replace or radically reinterpret much of the vocabulary of Greek and
modern philosophy, as Heidegger thought he needed to do.

And this reality, knowledge, and subject/

object unity depend upon value
Besides going beyond the familiar subject/object and “idealism”/“realism” seesaw,
Plato’s doctrine of a higher degree of reality unifies another major dualism. By
showing the role of the pursuit of what’s truly good in bringing about the fuller
reality of self-government, Plato shows that value, the Good, is an integral aspect
of reality itself. The soul that seeks what’s truly good, and not just whatever it’s
presently drawn to, is thereby able to govern itself rather than being a product
merely of whatever produced its current urges and opinions. And what governs
itself appears to be real in the strongest sense, by being real as itself. But in that
case, value (what’s truly good) plays an integral part in making what’s real in the

PLATO’S PROGRESS    127

strongest sense, real. The pursuit of the Good gives full reality to what has full
reality. Which means that “fact” and “value,” or the “is” (as it’s often put) and
the “ought,” aren’t independent of each other. What’s most real, what most “is,”
depends upon its pursuit of value, or the “ought,” to be what it is. And likewise
value, or the “ought,” will be found in what most “is.”33
This may be the single most important way in which Platonism challenges the
conception of reality that dominates most of our present-day thinking. We assume
that if anything can tell us about what’s “real,” it’s the natural sciences, and that our
experiences of value-clarification, freedom, love, and ecstasy, on the other hand,
tell us nothing about what’s real, but at most about what we “feel” or “value.” But
Plato and his followers including Hegel show how what’s real as itself, and thus
arguably more fully real than anything else, becomes so only through its pursuit
of what’s really good. So value, what’s really good, plays an indispensable role in
the genesis of what’s most real. Insofar, then, as the natural sciences ignore the
question of what’s really good, they can’t be the final arbiters of what’s real. They
give us only a part of the answer to that central question.
This is, once again, the issue of whether reality is merely “horizontal,” a feature
that things either have or don’t, or also has a “vertical” dimension, whereby some
things are more real than others. Modern thinking in general assumes that reality
is something that things either have or don’t. Platonism, on the other hand, argues
that we need to recognize a “vertical” dimension, a way in which some things are
more real than others, though the others do have a degree of reality (they “are and
are not”). And the things that are more real achieve this through their pursuit of
what’s truly good, as opposed to whatever they may be naturally programmed to
pursue. So that the fullest reality, the vertical dimension, depends entirely upon
value.
And, at the same time, value depends entirely on the fullest reality. Not on
what we currently want nor on what we “would” want under “ideal conditions”
(whatever those might be), nor on what we receive through some special “faculty,”
but on what gives us the most reality. So that everything that we learn about our
own functioning in relation to the world contributes to our understanding of value
in ourselves and the world, and vice versa. This value is transcendent insofar as our
fullest reality transcends our lower aspects, and it’s immanent insofar as our fullest
reality is what we contribute to the world.
This dual Platonic thesis is intimately tied up with our daily experience, in
which we move, through the absence or presence of inner freedom, from being
less fully ourselves to being more so, and vice versa. This is how Platonism is an
account of what human experience shows us about reality, and not merely an
account of entities (“Forms”) that, if they’re thought of as “separate,” could be
remote (as Blumenberg and others allege) from our experience.
Without the Platonic insight into the role of inner freedom and value in
constituting our own fullest reality and the world’s fullest reality, we have no

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satisfactory way of understanding ethics or the mind/body relationship, and we’re
stuck in incessant battles between “horizontal” materialism or naturalism and
rationally unsatisfactory versions of transcendence. Hopefully the interest, which
is so widespread today, in experiencing inner freedom and transcendence will
eventually lead people back to the tradition from Plato to Hegel which explains
what inner freedom and transcendence are, and how they’re fully rational.
Then, in conducting our lives together, we’ll be able to draw simultaneously
on all of our relevant kinds of experience, religious, ethical, scientific, and
(indeed) aesthetic, because we’ll see how the essence of each is compatible with
that of the others. And we’ll have the full benefit of the Platonic tradition, which
is always available to us but to which for long periods we often manage to be
rather deaf.

So this reality is what true learning and

true education will be about
Closely tied up with the question of what’s real and how we can know it is the
question of the nature and methods of education and what priorities individuals
and societies should have for it. Plato makes it clear that true learning—namely,
learning that’s about the fullest reality, and contributes to it—is not an acquisition
of information about external states of affairs. Since it’s learning about what makes
oneself fully functional and real in oneself, it’s primarily “subjective” and internal—
though useful things can be said about it from a more external perspective, as
Plato tries to do.
Plato says in Republic vii that the essential first step to gaining this knowledge
involves “turning the whole soul” (518c) from everyday concerns to a concern
with the true good. This “turning” may be the first description, in Western
literature, of what has subsequently (though often in a narrower, exclusively
“religious” sense) been described as the experience of “conversion.” Seen as part
of Plato’s big picture in Republic iv-vii, this turning takes us from a “horizontal”
world in which all realities are equal—equally shadows on the wall of the cave—to
a vertically organized world in which some realities are more self-governing, more
themselves, and in that sense more real than others. In this way, it creates (one
might say) the “self ” itself, as something that’s more internal and more fully itself
than the “dependently co-arising” shadows.
Plato seems rather ambivalent about the prospects for bringing about this
turning and this self. On the one hand, he speaks pretty drastically in Republic
vii of “compelling” a person (515c) (the phrase that Blumenberg emphasizes) and
of “hammering” on the soul “from childhood,” so as to “free it from the bonds
of kinship with becoming, which have been fastened to it by feasting, greed, and

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other pleasures” (519a). On the other hand, he has Socrates describe himself in
the Theaetetus as a “midwife” (150b) and in the Symposium as one who promotes
what Diotima calls “birth in beauty” (206c-e). These more organic processes of
emergence, in which the teacher only assists, are consistent with the thought
that what is essentially internal wouldn’t, in any case, be something that can be
brought about from outside. Plato’s apparent progress from the external images of
compelling and hammering to the more internal images of birth and midwifery
is completed by Plotinus who places the emphasis entirely “within” when he
describes God as being within us (Enneads V.I.11).34
This latter view of the most important kind of education, which sees it
as coming from inside and receiving only assistance from outside, has been
developed by modern writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey and
fits well with the thought of the German Idealists. To say that the most important
kind of knowledge—in the strict sense, the only true knowledge, inasmuch as it
relates to the only full reality—is internal and can’t be “put into” a person is not
to say, obviously, that the curricular content that we ordinarily call “knowledge”
is insignificant. Nor is it to say that a society can’t support and encourage the
pursuit of the most important, internal kind of knowledge. We are fortunate that
our culture does contain traditions, particularly centered around psychology,
literature, education, and religion, that have a considerable awareness of this most
important kind of knowledge. I suspect that most of these traditions have been
influenced, directly or indirectly, by Plato.35

The vertical dimension in human

personalities
To see how concerned Plato was with issues of education as liberation, it’s useful
to look at some of the numerous “case studies” (as we might call them) or portraits
that Plato presents in his dialogues. They make it very clear that he must have
developed his account of the “parts of the soul” in part through close observation
of individual human personalities.
Euthyphro, in the dialogue that bears his name, claims to be, and is proud
to be, an expert on the gods. But he isn’t able to explain what makes one action
godly and another ungodly. Blithely confident that it’s perfectly godly to take his
father to court, as he is doing, for letting a servant die—no false “family piety” for
Euthyphro—his primary motive seems to be self-congratulation, and we’re bound
to wonder how he got to be this way. Plato’s picture of Euthyphro suggests that a
person who is preoccupied with what he takes to be his own outstanding virtues,
and is bothered by none of the doubts that ordinary people might feel, is governed by
a need that he doesn’t understand. A comic figure in his one-sidedness, Euthyphro

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is, in effect, a puppet of this unexamined force of self-importance that’s at work in
him. He shows us how there is nothing highfalutin’ about Socrates’s prescription
of self-examination; it is a precondition of everyday human wholeness. A person
who can’t effectively examine his own motives is at the mercy of what he can’t
examine, and thus can’t be fully in charge of his life.
A second example: Thrasymachus, in Republic book i, is proud of what he takes
to be his independent thinking, exhibited in his convictions that justice is power
and tyrants are admirable. But when he tries to defend these ideas, it becomes clear
that they aren’t the result of much real thought. Falling back on ridicule, he makes
it clear that his convictions reflect emotional investments—probably a need to feel
important—more than cognitive investments. Thrasymachus apparently lacks a
sense of his own power and seeks to bolster himself by braggadocio, bluster, and
aggressiveness. This lack of a sense of his own power, a lack of which he clearly
has no understanding, motivates the main lines of his behavior. So one can hardly
say that his behavior expresses himself, except in the sense that it shows how little
effective “self ” he possesses. Like Euthyphro, he is at the mercy of motives that he
doesn’t understand and can’t control.
But Plato’s prize example of inner disunity is always Alcibiades, the handsome,
brilliant, and charismatic young leader who says in the Symposium that Socrates
makes him ashamed of his way of living, but he can’t help living that way.

I have heard Pericles and many other great orators, and I have admired their
speeches. But . . . they never upset me so deeply that my very own soul started
protesting that my life—my life!—was no better than the most miserable slave’s.
And yet that is exactly how [Socrates] makes me feel all the time. . . . Socrates
is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame. . . . Yet, the moment
I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the
crowd. (215e-216b)

Alcibiades’s “desire to please the crowd” overrules his “very own soul”: this most
gifted young man of his generation fails to enact what he himself takes to be good,
and allows himself to be governed by what isn’t him. His actions are governed
by a desire that he doesn’t understand well enough to be able to choose whether
or not to follow it. So his “own soul” is present only in his shame, and not in
his actions. Like Euthyphro and Thrasymachus, Alcibiades himself isn’t really in
charge of his life.
The Symposium’s narrator describes Socrates as maintaining, during the
wee hours of the morning at the end of the party, that authors should be able
to write both comedy and tragedy (223d). We might think that in his depiction
of Alcibiades, Plato meets this standard very well. In the Symposium itself,
Alcibiades is a charismatic reveler, a poetic storyteller, and a charmingly candid
self-deprecator. Like Robin Williams, in our day, he has his audience in the palm

PLATO’S PROGRESS    131

of his hand. But as Plato’s readers all knew, the historical Alcibiades had come to
a bad end and had taken the flower of Athenian youth with him, when the city’s
military expedition to Syracuse, which Alcibiades had promoted, turned out to be
a military disaster. Alcibiades was also suspected of having desecrated religious
mysteries, during a late-night drinking spree, in a way that might have been
thought to endanger Athens. These facts must have been in the foreground for
Plato, as he wrote the Symposium, and for his readers. One has to suppose that if
Alcibiades had had a better grasp of his own character and life, things would have
turned out differently for him and for Athens also, in significant respects. So the
light-hearted comedy that Plato shares with us in the Symposium opens, outside its
frame, into an archetypal tragedy.
Euthyphro, Thrasymachus, and Alcibiades all exhibit the more or less dramatic
consequences of the all too familiar, all too human failure to be in charge of one’s
own life. In the case of Alcibiades, this failure is all the more poignant because of
the great gifts that Alcibiades clearly possessed. What “helpless immortals” these
are, indeed!
Does anyone in the dialogues have a successful life, one that expresses his true
self rather than expressing external forces that he doesn’t understand or control?
Evidently, Socrates does. Socrates exhibits no self-congratulation, no anger,
shame, or desire to please anyone. Instead, his life expresses his own processing,
and the people around him who aren’t blinded by anger at having their ignorance
revealed by his examination are fascinated by this highly unusual phenomenon. In
Socrates, we see what the pursuit of the Good, of the vertical dimension in which
we become fully ourselves, can achieve.
Plato was clearly aware of the painful irony that Socrates, who exemplifies self-
realization in this exceptional way, was unable to help his beloved Alcibiades to
get beyond his “desire to please the crowd” and get in charge of his own life. And
the same is the case with many of Socrates’s other interlocutors. They dramatize
the difficult fact that the impetus for self-realization has to come from within. But
this doesn’t lead Plato to despair, since in Diotima’s speech (in the Symposium) and
elsewhere he continues to hold up for us the possibility that when such an impetus
is present, friends can be deeply helpful.
It seems likely that Plato’s apparent confidence that friends can be helpful in
this way, even though he gives us no extended case study of how this has happened
in a particular person, is due at least in part to his own personal experience of
interaction with Socrates. No doubt because of modesty on Plato’s part, we don’t
know any details of what that interaction was like. But the fact that it apparently led
Plato to make such an extended study of the process by which personal freedom
can come about gives us some idea of how important that experience must have
been for Plato himself.
From the care that Plato gives to describing Alcibiades and his other “case
studies,” it’s clear that he is interested in freedom in all of its aspects. There is no

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such thing for him as “mere psychology,” as opposed to philosophy. Nor is there
“mere literature,” though his studies of the personalities that I’ve mentioned seem
to me to amount to one of the first and greatest novels in Western literature. The
next chapter will examine in more detail what Plato shows us about freedom,
and it will also say something about his well-known ambivalence about political
freedom and democracy.

PLATO’S PROGRESS    133

134
6 PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US

Therefore I print; nor vain my types shall be:

Heaven, Earth, & Hell, henceforth shall live in harmony.
WILLIAM BLAKE, JERUSALEM

Plato’s way of understanding the world as a hierarchy of increasing degrees of

reality “as oneself,” opens up all sorts of possibilities for us. It enables us to think of
ourselves as having a “vertical” dimension, by which we’re involved with “higher
things,” without becoming entangled in the sort of alienating relationships of
rejection (e.g., of “Heaven” versus “Hell”!) that such a vertical dimension at first
seems to suggest. It also allows us to think of ourselves as having an “inner self,”
which is more truly us than our “outer” thoughts, desires, and actions. And this
vertical dimension, or this interiority, can also be crucial for our relationships with
each other, as we know from literature, psychology, and personal experience.
Let’s explore these new dimensions in a bit more detail.

How the “ascent” takes place

Plato knows that the idea of “going beyond,” by which the “reasoning” part of the
soul leads us “higher” in the knowledge of the good, is still pretty abstract for us.
He needs to give us a more concrete idea of what such an ascent would involve.
He does this in book vi of the Republic by having Socrates sketch two theories of
what’s really good. One is the theory that pleasure is the good, and the other is the
theory that knowledge is the good. Socrates produces objections to both of these
theories that appear to drive both of them from the field. Pleasure can’t be the sole
good, because everyone agrees that some pleasures are bad (505c). (Presumably
Socrates has in mind, for example, the pleasure that Leontius expects to get from
looking at the corpses.) If some pleasures are bad, then evidently something else is
involved in determining whether X is good, besides whether X is “pleasant” or not.
But knowledge can’t be the good, Socrates says, because when they’re asked
which knowledge in particular they have in mind, the advocates of this theory say
that it’s the knowledge of what’s good. And that, of course, means that the question
of what is good still remains to be answered (505b-c).
So Socrates drops both of these theories and begins to discuss more
abstractly how a person can hope to have knowledge of this sort of thing at
all. He talks about the “Form” of the good. Then he mentions mathematics as
a discipline that seems to find knowledge of abstract things like squares and
numbers, which go beyond any particular sensation that we might have (510e),
just as the good, apparently, goes beyond particular sensations like pleasure.
Squares and numbers go beyond any particular sensation because they apply to
innumerable particular experiences, both actual experiences and possible ones.
Our knowledge of these abstract topics in mathematics is always one of Plato’s
favorite examples of how knowledge apparently goes beyond any number of
particular sense experiences. It has a kind of generality that seems to require
some additional basis besides sensations as such. Hence his suggestions in
the Meno and Phaedo that the soul has an affinity with the Forms which goes
beyond our present lifetimes.
What does this talk about Forms and about mathematics have to do with the
question of what’s really good? I think we need to remember the two theories
that Socrates started with: that pleasure is the good and that knowledge is the
good. I doubt that he expects us simply to forget about these suggestions, once
he has shown that neither of them is adequate, by itself. When he’s talking about
knowledge of squares and numbers, in mathematics, he tells us that the diagrams
that mathematicians draw, and the other things that they see in the world around
them, are like reflections in water. They’re “images” of the real square or the
real “odd,” of which the mathematicians are seeking knowledge. You can’t base
knowledge of squares as such on one diagram, by itself. But the diagram does
have some relationship to the real square: it’s a “reflection,” a rough approximation
to the real thing. The same idea is at work, of course, in the cave story with its
shadows on the walls of the cave. They don’t tell you everything about what’s
casting the shadow, but they do tell you something about it, once you realize that
they aren’t the real thing, themselves.
Similarly, I suggest, neither the theory that the good is pleasure nor the theory
that it is knowledge tells us everything about the good itself. Two incompatible
theories obviously can’t provide the final story about the good itself. But probably
they do each tell us something about what the good itself is. Maybe the good is
something that often includes pleasure, and that in important cases also includes
knowledge. And when we understand exactly what it is, we’ll see why it has these
particular features, among others.

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 For creatures, like us, that can experience pleasure, the experience of what’s
really good is probably bound to carry pleasure with it. And for creatures that are
capable of connecting with reality in the way that we call “knowing,” it seems likely
that having that sort of connection with reality is a key feature of what’s good for
them. This explains why we’re likely to come up with theories like the two that
Socrates has mentioned, when we’re asked what’s really good. For us, at least, there
are intimate connections between the phenomena of pleasure and knowledge, on
the one hand, and the good, on the other.
This suggests that Plato wants us to think that the pursuit of knowledge of
important subjects, such as mathematics and the “good,” inevitably starts with
rough approximations, which are familiar to us in one way or another from our
everyday experience. Then it refines those approximations, by comparing them
to each other and trying to figure out which aspects of each of the competing
approximations are dispensable, and which are indispensable and thus are aspects
of the good itself. Or of the square itself, or whatever it may be that we’re seeking
to know. We figure out how to reconcile the approximations with one another,
in a coherent way. As we do this, we get further and further away from the
approximations themselves, and closer and closer to an adequate conception of
the good, the square, or whatever it may be.
This process of moving away from approximations and toward real knowledge
is what Plato dramatizes as the ascent from the cave into the sunlight.1 If you think
about it as a description of increasing maturity, for example, I think you’ll agree
that this is not an unrealistic description of what we really go through. Over time,
we get increasing intuitive understanding of what human life is really about. In the
case of the “good,” probably not much of this process is very conscious or explicit,
for most of us. And yet we know which of our friends and relatives have made
more progress on it, and which have made less, at different times in their lives and
in different areas of their lives.
This may not be an explicitly “intellectual” process, like mathematics, but
that doesn’t prevent it from being a very real process of learning. It’s a process
of acquiring important knowledge, which manifests itself in the innumerable
decisions that the person makes in the course of a day, a year, or a lifetime, even
though she may never spell much of it out in words.
So if this is the right way to understand it, the cave allegory is meant to show how
it’s reasonable for us to think that we can get improved understanding of difficult
subjects. In particular, of the nature of the good, of what’s really worthwhile. It’s
meant to show that these subjects aren’t just “matters of opinion,” or of mere “feeling,”
where any suggestion or feeling is as good as any other suggestion or feeling. On the
contrary, we can in fact make progress on these subjects, by considering all of our
initial “approximations” in an open-minded and thoughtful way.
When we acquire knowledge of what’s really good, we may be able to get for
ourselves what Socrates has plausibly suggested we all want: what’s really good,

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    137

rather than merely what’s believed to be good. But we also achieve something else
that’s equally or even more important. By pursuing this kind of knowledge, we
activate the reasoning part of our soul. We activate the part that’s distinguished
from the appetites and from the “spirited” part by the fact that it systematically
pursues not merely knowledge of how to satisfy the desires that we feel but
knowledge of what’s really good. And by activating this part we activate a part of
our soul that’s capable of having legitimate authority over the other parts, and thus
we make it possible for our soul, which has been “many things,” to “become one”
(as Socrates puts it at Republic 443d).
And we might well think that this “becoming one” is a necessary aspect of full
human freedom. For if my actions merely reflect certain parts of me, rather than
me as “one,” it looks as though rather than being free and responsible for these
actions, I’m not even fully present, as “myself,” in what’s going on.

The ascent from the cave as an

allegory of freedom
In one obvious way, the cave allegory reads like an allegory of freedom. The
cave people are “fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able
to see only in front of them” (514a), so that the only thing they can see is the
shadows on the wall of the cave, in front of them. They have no opportunity to
engage in anything like the process of learning that I’ve said the cave allegory
is about.
But when Plato goes on to describe the one person who does have the opportunity
to engage in a process of learning as being “freed and suddenly compelled to stand
up” (515c), we might wonder what this learning has to do with freedom. And Plato
describes him as resisting each of the new things that he’s forced to look at, and
only very gradually becoming accustomed to these higher realities.
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Hans Blumenberg (for one) takes at
face value these remarks about the cave person’s resisting and being compelled,
as evidence that Plato thinks that there is no motive sufficient to lead a person to
leave the cave behind of their own free will. I suggest, less drastically, that what’s
happening here is that Plato is dramatizing the great difference between our
familiar, everyday existence, amid our familiar (though mutually incompatible)
“approximations,” and the kind of existence that we’ll have if we try to go beyond
those approximations. All of our instincts, Plato suggests, attach us to those
approximations, regardless of the fact that they’re incompatible with one another.
The only way to move toward a more adequate, less approximate understanding is
to begin by freeing ourselves from these instinctive attachments, and this freeing
will initially be horribly disorienting and uncomfortable.

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 Plato’s description of the process of ascent is meant to dramatize this
disorientation and discomfort. It’s also meant to serve as an explanation of the
violent treatment that Socrates received from his fellow citizens, when he invited
them to leave their instinctive attachments behind them. Socrates says toward the
end of the allegory: “As for anyone who tried to free them and lead them upward,
if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him?” (517a).
These features of Plato’s dramatization certainly make the ascent from the
cave seem like a very unlikely event, and they could make us wonder why anyone
would ever actually want to leave the cave. But we can see why people would want
to, if we remember the context from book iv and book vi that I outlined in the
previous chapter. Our motive for leaving the cave is to be ourselves, to “become
entirely one,” and, for that purpose, to be guided by what’s really good, rather than
by mere belief.
If we focus on this motivation, then we’ll see that Plato’s overall intention in the
cave allegory isn’t to describe how one of the cave dwellers is mysteriously yanked
out of his accustomed surroundings and then equally mysteriously reinserted into
those surroundings. Rather, Plato wants to describe how making progress toward
being ourselves is likely to be disorienting and uncomfortable. But he also wants
us to see that this project reflects a deep need, which in modern parlance we might
describe as the need for “authenticity” or “self-determination” or “freedom.”
To see how Plato’s argument up to this point revolves around that need, is to see
that Plato has a lot more in common than he’s generally thought to have in common
with modern philosophy. By which I mean modern thinking about human life and
action, as exemplified by such thinkers as John Locke (“freedom from absolute,
arbitrary power”), Thomas Jefferson (“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”),
John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), and Jean-Paul Sartre (“man is condemned to be
free”). As well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant,
Virginia Woolf, W. E. B. Dubois, and many others. For all of these writers, personal
freedom in one sense or another is the single most central issue of all. If the cave
allegory is, in fact, centrally relevant to the issue of what freedom is, then Plato’s
Republic can speak to modern readers just as directly as these modern thinkers do.
Rather than speaking to us across a gulf of cultural difference or “fundamentally
different interests.”
There is in fact quite an influential scholarly trend that says that the Greeks were
concerned about “virtue” or the “good” or “natural law,” while leading modern
thinkers like Kant and John Stuart Mill (in his On Liberty) are more concerned
about individual freedom or autonomy. But to contrast a concern about the
Good with the modern concern about autonomy is to miss Plato’s point. Plato is
concerned about the Good because he’s concerned about our autonomy, our being
“one” and whole and self-governing, and the pursuit of the Good is autonomy, is
being one and whole and self-governing. So his central concern is essentially the
same as that of “moderns” including Kant, Hegel, and Mill.

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    139

 Writers who suggest that ancient and modern ethics are fundamentally different
include Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953); G. E. M. Anscombe,
“Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981/2007);
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989); J. B.
Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy
(1997); and John Christman, “Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy”
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online, 2009), which calls autonomy “very
much a modern development.”
Most of these authors suggest that while leading modern thinkers are concerned
about autonomy, the ancients were concerned about “virtue,” the Good, “order,” or
“natural law.” None of them connect the Good to autonomy or having a self in the
way that I see Plato connecting them in Republic iv-vii. These scholars often have
in mind Aristotle as the most important Greek ethical or political theorist, but
Aristotle’s “virtue ethics” is actually about autonomy in the same way that Plato’s
ethical thinking is. The “ergon” or “function” argument (Nicomachean Ethics i.7,
1097b-1098a), in which Aristotle draws attention to the centrality of reason in
human functioning, is where rational self-government or autonomy presents
itself in Aristotle. Desires and emotions are subordinated to reason through the
doctrine of the “mean,” so that “virtue” is the implementation of reason.2
A good corrective to our tendency to see the Greeks as concerned with different
issues from those that concern modern thinkers is to consider the relativism,
nihilism, and egoism that were taught in fourth-century BCE Athens by men like
Protagoras, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus. And then consider how much the question
of a rational response to relativism, nihilism, and egoism dominates our own agenda
today, just as it dominated Plato’s and Aristotle’s agendas in ancient Athens.
How Plato connects rational freedom or autonomy to ethical treatment of
others, I’ll explain in the next two chapters. (Please note that it should not be
assumed that a thinker who emphasizes rational freedom or autonomy will regard
free or autonomous people as only externally related to other people.)

Plato, a philosopher of freedom?

By now, though, readers who know something about Plato’s political ideas in the
Republic may have some pressing questions. How could the philosopher who
wants each social class to mind its own business, while the community is ruled by
the smallest class of all (the “philosopher-kings”), be described as a philosopher of
freedom? And while literature including Homer’s poetry and the Greek tragedies
is censored so that children won’t grow up with the wrong ideas? Not to mention
the fact that Plato raises no objection to the institution of slavery.
Here we undeniably have a major paradox on our hands. Plato makes it clear, in
the Republic, that he has no great love for democracy. After all, it was the Athenian

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democracy that put his teacher, Socrates, to death. Consequently, Plato is more
inclined to trust the opinions of the “wise,” than the opinions of the “many.” And
it’s obvious to him, as it presumably is to us as well, that in any community the wise
will be a small minority. So the political parts of the Republic aim to describe a set
of institutions that would maximize the chances that people who are actually wise
would be in charge of the community, regardless of whether this maximizes the
freedom of the citizens in general.
Indeed, Plato’s Socrates speaks of the soldiers and the business and craftspeople
of the city as each fulfilling their natures completely within these roles, and
having (apparently) no significant capacity for participating in public affairs, as
well. Socrates even suggests that the ideal city’s founders could encourage the
remainder of the population to stay in their places by telling them a “noble lie”
(414b) according to which they’re made of a different “metal” from the ruling
group. This is just the crowning denial of the rational capacities of most of the
population.
On the other hand, when Plato is writing about the education that occurs
through being led out of the cave, he makes Socrates flatly assert that “the power
to learn is in everyone’s soul” (518c; emphasis added). Which is a doctrine that
seems, in fact, to follow necessarily from what he said in book iv about the parts of
the “the soul.” Not about the parts of the “philosopher’s” soul but about the parts
of “the” soul, as such. If every soul contains a “reasoning” part, then every soul,
apparently, has the capacity to learn about the good. And if it has that capacity, it’s
not clear why it shouldn’t participate, in some fashion, in governing its community
in accordance with what it learns.
It seems clear that Plato has fundamentally conflicting thoughts about social
order. Probably especially because of the trauma that he experienced when he lost
his hero, Socrates, to the death penalty imposed by the Athenian people, Plato has
a deep distrust of “the people.” But he has also seen the learning that all sorts of
people experienced from associating with Socrates, and this leads him to think of
“everyone’s soul” as having the power to learn.
This latter side of Plato is the one that appeals to most of us, but I think that we
should be able to understand his emotional reluctance, as a result of his trauma,
to rely entirely on “education.” He was evidently working in two incompatible
directions at once, as he wrote the Republic, and people who have experienced
the deeply confusing long-term effects of trauma can probably understand how
he could contradict himself in this way. Plato’s willingness to recommend a
fundamental falsehood, a “noble lie,” may reflect his desire to avoid the repetition
of his early traumas. While his tentative willingness to respect others, as well as his
own body, and to seek to educate them toward willing cooperation, corresponds
to the liberating effects of love and forgiveness.
In Republic book v, Plato has Socrates contrast “lovers of opinion” with “lovers
of wisdom and knowledge” (479–80), and from book ii to book ix he repeatedly has

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    141

Socrates say that people differ by “nature,” with different parts of the soul “ruling”
in different classes of people, “philosophic, victory-loving, and profit-loving”
(581c). It’s noteworthy, however, that Socrates often describes these differences as
differences of degree, rather than of kind. “Each of us differs somewhat in nature
from the others”; “one learned it easily, the other with difficulty” (370a and 455b;
emphasis added). So the doctrine of differing “natures” may not flatly contradict
the doctrine that “the power to learn is in everyone’s soul” (518c).
The sharp contrast between “lovers of opinion” and “lovers of knowledge,”
on the other hand, is hard to square with the statement that “everyone wants the
things that really are good, and disdains mere belief here” (505d). If that were so,
then presumably everyone would love the knowledge that would ensure that they
get the things that really are good. I suppose we are meant to understand that
those who appear to love “opinion,” in fact love the mistaken opinions that they
take to be knowledge. Plato certainly is fairly pessimistic about the chances of
such people coming to recognize their mistakes, in practice, but his analysis of the
tripartite soul in Republic iv would lose its whole point if the rational part weren’t
the properly governing part, and if humans weren’t in general on some level aware
of this. We all want knowledge and not merely opinion, because we all want what’s
truly good and not just whatever we currently think is good.
It is certainly the case that Plato’s Republic and his Laws present political and
cultural institutions that are meant to guide citizens who don’t have knowledge of
what’s truly good and who could benefit (to some degree) from the guidance of
those who might have such knowledge. Plato is very concerned to provide for the
“non-ideal” circumstances in which this is the case. But it doesn’t follow from this
that his account of “the” soul’s capacity for self-government (its “power to learn”)
through its relation to the Good is not meant to apply to every one of us. Thus
when Carlos Fraenkel says that in modern times a “new . . . paradigm” gained
influence, which had been anticipated by Socrates but not by Plato, according to
which “all human beings are equally able to rationally rule themselves,” I would
say that this “new paradigm” played a fundamental role throughout Plato’s work as
well, though he certainly did hedge it, as Fraenkel describes.3
Maybe it’s not such a paradox, after all, that the greatest philosopher of freedom,
as I would describe Plato, may have had a harder time fully embracing freedom
than many of us armchair types think we have. Real inner freedom may not be as
easy to come by as we like to suppose.
I should emphasize that my hypotheses about the psychological background of
Plato’s political suggestions in the Republic are simply hypotheses. We have little or
no reliable information about Plato’s personal life. The authenticity of the “letters”
that are ascribed to him and included in his “complete works” is disputed. We
do know, however, that Plato always presents tyranny in a very unfavorable light,
and (obviously) that he greatly admired Socrates. So my suggestion that Plato
experienced both the reign of the Thirty and the death of Socrates as traumatic

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seems pretty plausible. And his willingness even to fantasize about a “noble lie,”
which is to be addressed to people whose souls he himself describes as capable of
learning the truth, certainly calls for some sort of explanation.

The distinctiveness of Plato’s theory

of freedom
So the place where we find Plato analyzing and advocating freedom is not in his
discussions of politics, as such, but in his discussions of the internal functioning of
individuals. Unlike his thoughts in the Republic about ideal political institutions,
his analysis and advocacy of individual freedom, with its account of what’s involved
in “becoming one” and leading a life that’s really one’s own, is just as plausible and
relevant today as it was when he wrote it.
What is the upshot of Plato’s analysis of what we might call “inner freedom,”
which he himself calls “becoming one,” in the Republic? It’s that freedom or
becoming one isn’t merely a matter of not being coerced or interfered with by
other people. My freedom isn’t just the “negative” fact that other people aren’t
interfering in my life. Because whether or not other people are interfering in my
life, the question can still be asked, Do my actions reflect me, as “one,” or do they
merely reflect parts of me, such as particular appetites, or passions like anger or
shame or contempt? If they merely reflect parts of me, they aren’t fully my own,
in the way that the actions that reflect my unified “soul” are my own. That kind
of scattered, non-“united” action seems just as unfree, in its way, as an action
that’s forced upon me by the interference of other people. In both cases the action
doesn’t fully reflect me but instead reflects things that aren’t fully myself, whether
they’re parts of me or actually other people.
So this is why Plato’s conception of freedom or “becoming one” gives a central
role to the reasoning part of the soul. It’s not because Plato wants to abolish other
features of human life, such as appetite and emotion, but because only reason can
unify a person in such a way that she can own her actions and have them reflect
herself. So only reason allows her to be fully herself and (in modern parlance) be
free: fully responsible for her actions.
Parenthetically, it may sound as though Plato is saying that a person is
responsible for her actions only when her soul is functioning perfectly, but Plato’s
approach doesn’t require that. What it requires is that the person has developed
the ability to think matters through and act “as one,” even if she didn’t choose
to act that way in a particular case. Her choice not to act this way, not to think
when she knew that thought was called for, makes her responsible in the same
way that actual thought would make her responsible. Much of our functioning
is, in practice, habitual, but thought is still relevant insofar as we know that we’re

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ultimately responsible for our habits, as well as for our fully calculated actions. If
those habits are dangerous, we ought to take steps to eliminate them or prevent
them from governing our important actions.
A familiar theory of freedom or being responsible for one’s actions which differs
from Plato’s theory, says that freedom is the simple absence of external causes that
explain one’s actions. (The external causes that are supposed to be absent would,
of course, include interfering or coercive actions by other people.) This simple
view, which is often called “voluntarism,” was advocated by the eighteenth-century
Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, to some extent also by Immanuel Kant, and
apparently by twentieth-century existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre.
But the voluntarist theory has problems. No one doubts that if other people
coerce you, this makes you less free and less responsible for your actions. But
many people doubt that it’s possible for a human action to be affected by no
external causes whatever, as this theory seems to require in cases where a person
is responsible for an action. For presumably (we imagine) the ideas and feelings
that influence your action were themselves caused by experiences that you had
or by inherited instincts or patterns of behavior, which ultimately came from
outside you.
Some of the philosophers who have these doubts about the voluntarist theory
are attracted to a third theory of freedom or responsibility, according to which a
person is free or responsible for her actions when her actions reflect her character.
They think this is true, regardless of what causes may have brought that character
about. If this is simply you, it doesn’t matter what caused it. You are responsible
for the actions that flow from you. This is the view of empiricists such as Thomas
Hobbes and David Hume.
In response to this empiricist theory, a critic could point out that sometimes
people have strong objections to well-established aspects of their own character.
Would a person still be fully responsible for actions that reflect aspects of his
character which he wishes he could get rid of, and has tried (perhaps unsuccessfully)
to get rid of? It doesn’t seem fair to hold a person fully responsible for something
that he has tried to get rid of.
Neither the voluntarist theory nor the empiricist theory provides for “unifying”
a person in the way that Plato’s account does, with its focus on the role of reason.
While the voluntarist theory of responsibility would apparently exonerate
a person of responsibility for actions that flowed from aspects of his character
that weren’t spontaneous but were caused by (say) his early environment, Plato’s
theory would not. For, Plato would point out, a person who has had a difficult
early environment may be able to recognize, to some degree, the resulting flaws
in his character, and to work to limit or reduce their effects on his actions. This
is the kind of thing that reason can do, and which we clearly take into account in
evaluating a person’s degree of responsibility. By describing actions for which we’re
responsible as somehow purely spontaneous, voluntarism directs our attention

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away from the practical issue of what a person can do to make herself more fully
responsible, more free, more “united.” Whereas Plato’s theory, with its focus on the
interaction of reason and appetites and emotions, directs our attention precisely
toward practical issues like these.
As for the empiricist theory, with its focus on the person’s concrete character,
it doesn’t make voluntarism’s mistake of directing attention toward an abstract
spontaneity. What the empiricist theory, on its side, overlooks is the whole issue
of the person’s knowledge of and attitude toward his character. As we know from
modern psychotherapy, it is possible to make significant changes in aspects of
one’s character that were produced by difficult early experiences, but this can be an
arduous process and getting it started at all may seem to depend upon unusually
favorable circumstances. Even simply being aware of one’s character as something
over which one might have some control, isn’t something that can be taken for
granted. Since all of this is the case, it hardly seems fair to hold a person fully
responsible for actions that reflect character flaws that he hasn’t been able to or
perhaps hasn’t even tried to root out. But given that there were things that he (in
some sense) could have done to not be the kind of person that he is, it doesn’t seem
that we should exonerate him entirely, either. It’s a very complicated issue.
This whole complex issue is one that Plato’s theory, with its focus on the dynamic
relations between reason and emotion, consciousness and character, encourages
us to explore. The empiricist theory on the other hand, which simply says, “These
character traits are you,” hardly seems to do justice to these issues. The case is
similar with the voluntarist theory, which ignores the issue of how conscious you
are and how much control you have over your character.
Neither the voluntarist nor the empiricist theory seems to do as good a job
as Plato does of explaining how and why we view persons, and not just parts of
persons (their character traits, or their supposed spontaneity), as responsible for
their actions.4 Nor do they explain as well what’s absent when we think that a
person isn’t responsible for her actions. If a person “wasn’t able to tell the difference
between right and wrong,” as we say, and therefore wasn’t fully responsible for her
action, Plato would say that this was because the reasoning part of her soul was
absent or out of commission for some reason. (Say, the person was in the grip
of psychotic delusions.) And if, on the other hand, we think that the person was
responsible for her action, one key reason for this must be that her reasoning part
was present and able to function.
The libertarian and empiricist theories have no ready explanation of the basis
for this common judgment (“She wasn’t able to tell the difference between right
and wrong”) that we make when we say that a person wasn’t responsible for her
action. In that respect as well, Plato’s theory of the soul seems much the most
practical of these three leading theories of freedom or responsibility. Which is
another good reason for rejecting the common stereotype according to which
Platonism is unworldly or impractical.

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    145

 An important weakness of modern “existentialism,” as well, is that it fails to
focus on the role of thinking about what’s really good, in making a person free
and responsible. What the existentialists do usefully focus on is our need to have
the courage to face the real facts of our situation. But they don’t clarify how a fully
free person would function once she has faced those facts. Consequently, they
often leave us with the impression that there’s something ultimately arbitrary, in
“free choice” or in what a person who manages to be “authentic,” or truly “herself,”
really “is” and does. Whereas, when we understand Plato’s explanation of the role
of the “reasoning part” in unifying the soul and thus making it fully real, we see
why arbitrariness couldn’t unify the soul, or even make a person fully responsible
for what she does.
In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, relatively few prominent
writers seem to have grasped Plato’s point, and the consequent role of “reason” in
freedom.5 Because Plato’s account speaks so directly to the issue of what it is to be
a functioning human being, I think it deserves to be much better known than it is.

Modern controversies about the

Plato/Hegel theory
Hegel has been the most prominent modern advocate of Plato’s view of freedom and
responsibility, as opposed to those of the voluntarists (Reid, Kant, Sartre) and the
empiricists (Hobbes and Hume). During the twentieth century, the disagreement
between the Plato/Hegel view of freedom and voluntarist or empiricist views
unfortunately became tangled up with contemporary political issues in a way that
caused a lot of confusion.
Many philosophers were naturally horrified by the human rights disasters of
fascism and communism that befell much of Europe and Asia in the twentieth
century. Some of them came to the conclusion that the philosophers who were
influential in Germany in the nineteenth century, including Plato and Hegel,
might have been partly to blame for these developments. For one thing, Karl Marx
asserted that he owed a good deal to Hegel’s philosophy. And despite Marx’s evident
humanitarian passion, he certainly bears a lot of responsibility for the dictatorship
and disregard for human rights that we saw in the Soviet Union and in communist
China. In his passionate advocacy of the empowerment of the downtrodden,
Marx ignored issues about ethics, democratic processes, and individual freedom,
thus giving a semblance of legitimacy to the way the Soviet and Chinese dictators
likewise ignored those issues. And as for fascism, the most murderous fascists, the
Nazis, emerged in Hegel’s homeland.
Karl Popper connected Plato and Hegel with twentieth-century totalitarianism
in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and Isaiah Berlin made a similar

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suggestion in his influential essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958). In that essay,
Berlin distinguished between “negative” and “positive” conceptions of liberty. My
“negative” liberty is the fact that no one else interferes with my actions. Hobbes and
Hume focus on this absence of interference, together with the requirement that my
action reflects my character. Plato and Hegel, on the other hand, have a “positive”
conception of liberty, in that they think that in order to be fully free, I must have
a certain relationship to “reason.” Berlin suggested that “positive” conceptions of
liberty threaten free social relations by making it possible to criticize individuals
and perhaps to interfere with their actions in order to promote the “reason” that
they’re supposedly neglecting.6
Unfortunately, Berlin didn’t address the issue of whether a person could be
described as “free” if, for example, she was in the grip of schizophrenic delusions.
Or if she was a “wanton” who simply did whatever came into her head at the time,
without being able to subject it to any thought whatever. So he didn’t see that
Plato’s and Hegel’s conceptions of “freedom” address a very practical issue. It’s so
practical that it’s constantly being addressed, for example, in criminal courts, where
judges and juries have to decide whether defendants were fully responsible for
their actions because they “understood the difference between right and wrong.”
(Or as Plato and Hegel would put it, whether they were capable of thinking about
what to do, rather than simply responding to impulses.) Failing to appreciate this
concretely practical relevance of Plato’s and Hegel’s thinking about freedom, Berlin
apparently concluded that Plato’s well-known opposition to democracy must have
been grounded in his theory of freedom as involving reason.
I’ve acknowledged that advocates of political liberty have good grounds for
suspecting Plato of not respecting it. But we shouldn’t let this fact discredit all of
Plato’s ideas for us. Plato’s theory of the inner freedom of the philosopher, of which
he actually tells us that all souls are capable, has nothing to do with his rather
“controlling” theory of social order. Instead, as I’ve pointed out, it points in a very
different direction.
Plato’s and Hegel’s conceptions of inner freedom do indeed raise the possibility
that aspects of a person’s freedom of action can legitimately be interfered with
if the community concludes that she isn’t able to apply “reason” to govern her
own actions. But it’s very unlikely that Isaiah Berlin would actually have disagreed
with this view, if it were applied (for example) to a person whose schizophrenic
delusions were causing her to try to commit suicide, or some other drastic action.
Obviously, the community’s interference with people’s actions needs to be
very carefully limited, so that it doesn’t wind up interfering with behavior that’s
merely unconventional, as opposed to disastrously irrational. But it seems clear
that careful thought about these issues will be aided, rather than undermined, by
figuring out how much “reason” a person must be capable of in order for us to
say that we ought to respect her decision (say) to refuse medical treatment, or
to end her life in other ways. Certainly Hobbes’s and Hume’s classical empiricist

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    147

conception of responsibility offers little or no help in these difficult cases. Neither
does Reid’s and Sartre’s voluntarism. Of the theorists I’ve mentioned, Plato and
Hegel are the only ones whose theories of freedom actually speak to this issue in a
direct and useful way.
As for Hegel’s supposed influence on Marx and, through him, on Soviet
totalitarianism, it’s notable that whatever Marx may have learned from Hegel, he
didn’t learn to pay careful attention to ethics, nor did he learn to think carefully
about freedom. Marx didn’t refer to these aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, nor did
Marx give any attention, himself, to developing a satisfactory conception of ethics
or of freedom. And as for the Nazis, they were extremely suspicious of Hegel,
precisely because of the explicit centrality of freedom in all of his thinking.7
An additional misfortune of the twentieth century was the way Plato’s and
Hegel’s conceptions of inner freedom and responsibility were blamed for these
political developments in which the main actors showed no concern for inner
freedom or responsibility. A more sympathetic and nuanced understanding of
Plato and of Hegel is still struggling to emerge from this rather dark age.

Condemning, forgiving, and

understanding
When we achieve such an understanding, it will aid us in understanding not only
Plato and Hegel but ourselves. Plato shows us, in book iv of the Republic, how his
rationalist conception of freedom can unify a person “vertically,” by bringing her
appetites and her rational part into harmony with each other. In this way, it can
(potentially) overcome a great deal of the “alienation” that often takes place within
individuals. When a person’s rational part understands the way his emotional
habits emerged from his early experiences, it can work gradually and intelligently
to change those habits, rather than responding to them (say) with denial and
ineffective repression. Likewise for our bodily appetites, we can sympathize with
them without being simply dominated by them. We don’t need to be at war with
ourselves, our soul versus our body, as the dualistic approach that’s suggested
by some of Plato’s language in the Phaedo suggests. Fortunately for us, Plato’s
systematic thinking in Republic iv avoids the antagonistic dualism that his habitual
language (especially in parts of the Phaedo) helped to catapult into our collective
consciousness.
Plato’s conception of freedom can also help us to overcome much of the
alienation that occurs not within but between individuals. We need to hold
each other responsible for our actions if we’re to have a society that’s based on
mutual respect rather than on sheer force. If we are responsible for our actions,
we are capable (in principle) of thinking about them and responding to rational

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discussion about how we ought to act. So responsibility is central for a society
that hopes to be guided by reasoning and not just by coercion. But if we hope to
be fully free and unalienated, by being defined or determined by ourselves rather
than by our inevitable conflicts with each other, we also need to be able to forgive
each other.
Bear in mind that forgiving an action doesn’t mean tolerating it or even
allowing it. We often need, in this life, to struggle (in various ways) with other
people’s thoughts and actions. People often won’t respond immediately, if at all, to
what seem to us to be good reasons for acting in various ways. What forgiveness
accomplishes, in these situations, is that it prevents these people from becoming
simply our “enemies.” It keeps us in touch with what we have in common with
them. And thus it protects us against the demonizing of “the enemy,” to which
demagogues regularly resort in order to enlist our support for their rule and their
policies.
Plato’s conception of freedom makes it possible for us to forgive each other
because it shows us how to understand evil as a corrupted understanding of what’s
good, rather than (say) as a love of something that’s the opposite of the good.
Following Plato’s conception, we can understand a person like Adolf Hitler, for
example, as, first, having been convinced, probably by experiences in his early
childhood, that personal power is a good thing and, second, having failed to get
beyond those convictions in order to discover how other things are also good
which place limits on the goodness of personal power, as such.
Hitler’s theory of the “good” is certainly very primitive, but we can still recognize
it as a theory of the “good,” rather than a decision (say) to adopt evil, as such, as his
guide. So that, rather than being merely “sick,” or in the grip of an unintelligible
“force of evil,” Hitler is, in a certain way, perfectly intelligible. We can understand
and identify with his desire to have what he perceives as “good,” even while we
regret the emotional and intellectual distortion of his perception, utterly condemn
the actions to which his perception led him, and do our best to prevent those
actions from being carried out.
Why do people sometimes “choose evil”? Because they see it in some way as
good! Not “morally” good, in a conventional sense, of course, but not merely a
“luxury” good for themselves, either, but an indispensable good for their existence
and self-respect, and thus a good that they think the world owes them. If they
didn’t see their choice of what we call “evil” as good in this way, it wouldn’t be
intelligible as a choice. It would just be a random flip of a coin, for the outcome of
which no one is responsible.
If we see Hitler’s actions not as random but as seeking the good, while disastrously
failing to find it, it becomes possible to forgive his actions. Excruciatingly difficult,
no doubt, but possible. Whereas it would probably not be possible to forgive his
actions if we viewed him as merely “sick,” as purely “evil,” or as literally “inhuman.”
If we were to put him in any of those categories, we wouldn’t be able to understand

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    149

him as making real choices, and consequently wouldn’t be able either to blame
him for those choices or to forgive him for them either.
If we can’t blame Hitler, we’ll be in a very difficult position with many human
actions that cause havoc and destruction. Don’t we object to them, and don’t we
seek to give reasons why they’re unacceptable? But if we blame Hitler and we
combat him but we can’t forgive him, perhaps because we think of him as sheer
“evil” or as simply “insane,” we’re still not in a good position, since then our
world contains people who seem to be our sheer “enemies,” not reachable even
in principle by any kind of reasoned appeal. Our lives are then, in principle, a
constant state of war, and we can never be fully free.
In a review of Ralph Wedgwood (2007), Alan Millar asks,

Why should we suppose that intention constitutively aims at choiceworthy

action . . .? The view that it does echoes the classical view [that is, Plato’s view—
RMW] that action constitutively aims at the good. While such a view is still
quite widely held, it is doubtful that it is psychologically realistic. . . . People
all too easily form and carry out intentions that are weak-willed or perverse,
knowingly acting for reasons that even by their own lights have nothing to
do with what is worthy of choice on any natural understanding of what that
would amount to. A father who kills his children to spite their mother need
not conceal from himself that nothing good can come of it, only satisfaction of
an urge to teach the mother a bitter lesson. (Mind 119 [January 2010], p. 265)

I think there is greater “psychological realism” in understanding such a father

as seeking the indispensable “good” of (as I imagine) vindicating his own
highly threatened ego, his efficacy in the world, against what he feels is a threat
of obliteration. This renders his action intelligible in a way that describing it as
“perverse,” tempting though such descriptions undoubtedly often are, simply fails
to do. “Weakness of will” must also be understandable in similar ways. Otherwise,
we make vast ranges of human behavior essentially unintelligible. Of course
the intelligibility that results from the view that I recommend renders human
“intellectual” functioning a lifelong and seldom fully conscious process, which is
only partially captured by what an individual can articulate (as “his own lights”) at
any particular point in time. But this too seems realistic.

Plato and our “dark side”

Plato and the Platonic tradition have often been suspected of being foolishly
“idealistic,” in the sense of underestimating the evil in human beings and the
“tragic” side of human experience. Plato’s contemporary, the great Greek historian
Thucydides, described Athens’s policies toward its “allied” cities as ruthless and

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motivated by brute calculations of self-interest. Writing during the English Civil
War of the 1600s, Thomas Hobbes argued that the only way for humans to avoid
destroying one another through mutual predation is to set up a dictatorial power
over society which will terrify us all into submission. And in the nineteenth
century, Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that the Platonic “ascent” and the Christian
interest in a “world to come” were both motivated by a desire to get a phantom
“revenge” for pain suffered in the material world. Thus all three of these “masters
of suspicion” suggest that appeals to justice and virtue, and discussions about
them, are likely to overlook less admirable and more self-centered human motives,
or even to contain disguised forms of them.
I mentioned that Plato’s own family contained people who acted in ways that
might seem to confirm these writers’ suspicions about human nature. Plato’s uncle,
Critias, was the leader of the “Thirty Tyrants” who took ruthless actions against
their democratic opponents during their short-lived tyranny over Athens in 404–
403 BCE. Plato presents Critias as a bewildered victim of Socrates’s questioning
in the Charmides, which is set in 432 BCE, several years before Plato’s birth. The
only hint, in this dialogue, of the ugliness that was to come is when Charmides,
who is Critias’s nephew and was himself later one of the “Thirty,” joking seriously
tells Socrates that Socrates has no choice but to serve as Charmides’s teacher
(176c). We know from Plato’s Apology of Socrates that the “Thirty” in fact did try,
unsuccessfully, to use the threat of death to force Socrates to become an accomplice
in their misdeeds. Thus, without publicly “washing his family’s dirty linen,” Plato
hints at the moral agony that he must have experienced when his relatives resorted
to overt coercion against the people of Athens and against Plato’s hero and teacher,
Socrates.
In other dialogues, Plato describes individuals who at the time of the dialogue’s
action are clearly on, or close to, the “dark side.” Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias,
maintains that those who praise self-control and justice do so merely because
they’re too weak to take what they want from others (492a). And Thrasymachus,
in the first book of the Republic, carries Callicles’s thought further by praising
tyrants for achieving happiness and bliss (344c). Thrasymachus’s aggressive
manner frightens people, and when Socrates’s questioning makes Thrasymachus
uncomfortable, Thrasymachus resorts to insults: “Tell me, Socrates, do you still have
a wet nurse?” (343a) Thrasymachus’s notion of discussion is modeled on wrestling:
“Now practice your harm-doing and false witnessing on that if you can—I ask
no concessions from you—but you won’t be able to” (341b). His goal is to win,
and his failure to do so puts him into an angry and sarcastic huff. Plato sticks to
the dramatic context, offering us no hypotheses about Thrasymachus’s childhood
environment, but we can see in Thrasymachus the habits of the schoolyard bully
who has a weakness that he’s ashamed of, and goes on the offensive so as to hide it.
You might say that Thrasymachus shows us what the “spirited part” that
Socrates analyzes in Republic book iv can turn into when the rational part doesn’t

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    151

understand or control it. It is self-importance carried to the nth degree. But I would
add that the rational part’s failure, in these cases, isn’t accidental or unintelligible.
Rather, Thrasymachus’s rational part has developed only to the point of identifying
success (the good) with “winning.” Its ability to think about other dimensions of
the good has been stunted, probably because the issue of winning has been given
such salience by its traumatic early experience that no attention is left over for
these other dimensions.
So Plato certainly doesn’t underestimate the power of the damaged ego to create
havoc in the world. What he does do is to help us neither to “run screaming” from
this phenomenon nor to build ourselves up by distancing ourselves from it, by
(for example) interpreting it as sheer “evil,” or as a symptom of “illness,” outside
the moral realm, or as “monstrosity” or “brutality”: being mis-born or less than
human. On the contrary, Plato clearly thinks of the power-admirer’s psychology as
all too human, and perfectly intelligible. By presenting it in this way, he helps us to
preserve the possibility of full freedom, in which we can identify with everything
in our world as an attempt at freedom, rather than simply rejecting big pieces of
our world, and thus denying ourselves full freedom.

“To call the wolf my brother”

Carl Gustav Jung wrote that “modern man’s” problem is “to learn how he is to
reconcile himself with his own nature—how he is to love the enemy in his own
heart and call the wolf his brother.” Here Jung put his finger on an issue that Plato
was already addressing two millennia earlier, with his theory of the “Good” and
the potential unity of the three parts of the soul. Because the attitude of judgment
or condemnation which is the first step in rational functioning makes us disunited
or “alienated,” and thus while making us free also limits our freedom, the act of
identifying what deserves to be condemned fails to make us fully free. We must
also be able to love what we condemn—the “wolf,” the enemy, whether outside us
or within us. And invite it into the fold.
To invite the damaged ego into the fold, we must understand what its goal is,
and how its conception of its goal may have been warped by its (probably early)
experience. To understand this, in ourselves, we must be much more loving and
patient with ourselves than we probably usually are. We aren’t likely to achieve this
love and patience unless we understand that the ego is a project of thought about
what’s good, rather than a mere random drive toward “good” or “evil,” “human”
satisfactions or “bestial” ones. Understanding the ego as a project of thought about
what’s good, we may be able, over time and with patience, to unravel its early, now
habitual thoughts, correct them, and reknit them.
No doubt our success in this endeavor will always be limited. But knowing that
it’s achievable in principle, we won’t despair of human nature and condemn it as

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irredeemable, thus condemning our world and ourselves as irredeemable. Knowing
that this reknitting can, in principle, be done, because the ego is a project of thought,
we have accomplished, in principle, the reconciliation that Jung speaks of.
This is, obviously, a profoundly reassuring development. Having the tendency to
skepticism that we properly have, the only thing that can make such a development
possible for us is the careful, unsentimental examination of human experience that
Plato and his successors carry out. Among whom we can count many twentieth-
century psychotherapists, although, like Jung, they may not know a great deal
about Plato himself. Thanks to the long tradition of broadly Platonic “soul”-work,
whether it’s called philosophy or literature or religion or psychotherapy, we know
that “Pollyanna” sentimentality is not the only alternative to the courageous
cynicism of the “masters of suspicion,” such as Thucydides, Hobbes, and Nietzsche.

“God-given madness” (Phaedrus)

It’s clear that the kind of “reconciliation” that we’re talking about here is not a
“merely intellectual” event. It involves physical and emotional depths with which
the intellect, often, has little contact. The rarity of this sort of contact provides
some justification for the skepticism that the masters of suspicion encourage,
regarding the intellect’s powers.
But such contact does occur. Not all mental processes are conscious, and
not all unconscious processes are “irrational.” I think Plato could accept Jung’s
discovery of the constructive role of the unconscious, as a “friendly amendment”
to his theory of the role of thought in human life. This is another case in which
conscious thought can find and appreciate the friendly cooperation of other “parts
of the soul.”
In fact, the same friendly amendment that Jung proposes was already, in effect,
proposed by Plato himself, when he wrote in various places about the positive
contribution to human life that’s made by certain apparently irrational phenomena.
According to Plato, Socrates himself frequently experienced what he called a “divine
sign,” a sense that he shouldn’t do something that he otherwise would have done.
Socrates always obeyed this “sign,” with what appear to be good results (Apology
31d). Socrates also experienced protracted periods of apparent trance, in which
no one knew what Socrates was doing.8 Plato’s most explicit theoretical account of
phenomena like these is in his Phaedrus, where Socrates lists four different kinds
of divine inspiration, producing “madness” (mania) in humans, which in every
case is beneficial. These are the inspired ravings of Apollo’s prophetesses at Delphi
and Dodona, Dionysian rites and purifications, songs and poetry that are inspired
by the Muses, and the divinely inspired state of love (244–45).
It’s noteworthy that Plato here seems to suggest a much more open-minded view
both of poetry and of love than he had in the Republic.9 Perhaps he was becoming

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    153

more aware than he had been initially of some of the liberal implications of the
Republic’s account of the Good and the soul.
In any case, it seems reasonable to think of the wisdom that we sometimes
find in our dreams, as belonging alongside the poetry, purification, prophecy, and
love that Plato lists here as “God-given.” Like the other kinds of “madness” that
Socrates lists, these dreams seem to be manifestations of a process of something
like thought, which however we aren’t conscious of engaging in as thought. This
unconscious thought gives us what our conscious mind can sometimes recognize
as inspired commentary.
By these observations, Plato obviously doesn’t intend to praise “madness” in
general. He’s careful to specify that the kinds of madness that he’s talking about are
the “god-given” ones, thus suggesting that other kinds of madness probably don’t
have the beneficial effects that these have. People who have first-hand experience
of both the “god-given” and the other kinds of madness will probably be inclined
to agree with Plato about this.
Here again, Plato isn’t “starry-eyed” but eminently realistic. As for Jung, so also
for Plato, the great achievement is when the “rational part” of the soul is able to
appreciate and to work with the other parts, including the “madness” that conveys
to us the results of thought processes that we’re not conscious of engaging in.

A less fearful rationality

Plato’s investigation of the role of thought arrives at less pessimistic results than the
“masters of suspicion” arrive at. This isn’t because Plato averts his eyes from our
“dark side” or from our unconscious functioning, but because he examines them
with more care than the masters of suspicion do. Plato doesn’t assume the worst: for
example, that we seek only our own power, survival, and self-centered satisfactions.
Or that our unconscious functioning is simply a domain of repressed desires.
Instead, he notices that we actually seek “the things that really are good” (Republic
505d), whatever those may turn out to be, and he describes how this often conscious
search interacts with less conscious kinds of searching for the same thing.
Just as the “rational part” has to judge the validity of the spirited part’s strong
feelings, so it also has to judge the messages that it receives from unconscious thought
processes. Something has to decide which unconscious thought processes are the
“god-given” ones and which ones aren’t. We might think, for example, of the famous
story in the book of Genesis in which we’re told that “God” instructs Abraham to
prepare to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Is Abraham justified in believing that this is, in fact,
the voice of God, rather than of some less authoritative part of the universe? The only
plausible candidate for the job of making these decisions is Abraham’s rational part.
The story of Abraham and Isaac was Soren Kierkegaard’s prize exhibit in his
critical response to what he took to be Hegel’s narrow-minded adherence to “reason.”

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Kierkegaard felt that in his rationalism, Hegel had betrayed religion’s inherent
commitment to something that goes beyond mere human comprehension.10 In
response, I would suggest that Plato and Hegel both acknowledge that there are
modes of thought or reason at work in the world with which our conscious mind
has only limited contact.11 And that it is highly appropriate for us to acknowledge
and to seek to learn from these “unconscious” modes of thought or reason, as Jung
and others have taught us to do, through the study of dreams and synchronicities.
But Plato and Hegel both point out that it’s not appropriate to embrace
everything that comes from unconscious sources. Our “rational part” needs to be
at work, distinguishing as best it can the “madness” that’s probably “God-given”
from the madness that’s not God-given. This is the aspect of the relation between
religion and reason that Kierkegaard seems to neglect, in his discussion of the
story of Abraham and Isaac and his critique of Hegel’s supposedly un-“religious”
rationalism. For if true religion required us to embrace everything that comes to
us with a voice of authority from unconscious sources, then true religion would
not be merely paradoxical, as Kierkegaard describes it, but literally insane. To say
in response that religion requires us only to embrace what comes from God is to
invite precisely the question, How do you distinguish what comes from God from
what comes from other sources?
Plato’s formulation in the Phaedrus about “God-given madness,” which
suggests that not all madness is “God-given,” points to this issue of how we should
distinguish what’s God-given from what’s not; and Plato addresses this issue in
his Euthyphro and Timaeus (71e–72b). It’s hardly likely that Plato meant his talk
of God-given madness to open the gates indiscriminately to every claim to divine
inspiration.
A major reason why people are attracted to Kierkegaard’s notion of faith
as “absurd,” and to similar doctrines about religion, is that they have the quite
justified impression that modern culture in the name of what it calls “reason” has
to a large extent leveled off the vertical dimension of the sacred, the higher reality.
But when we see with Plato’s or Hegel’s help that such levelling-off is not, in fact,
ultimately rational, we can see that the defense of a higher reality doesn’t need to
embrace anything that’s opposed to rationality.

Freedom and divinity

It’s no wonder, then, that Plato’s conceptions of the Good and the soul have
influenced many serious thinkers, in the West, about human functioning and
human society. And they have also influenced many serious thinkers about the
relation between humans and God. The “vertical” dimension of ascent toward
knowledge of the Good and consequently toward greater unity, freedom, and
reality as oneself is a very suggestive way to conceptualize the relation between

PLATO, FREEDOM, AND US    155

finite, imperfect beings like ourselves, and whatever is divine. Plato consequently
alludes to the possibility that a “philosopher,” who makes an ascent like the one
from the Cave, would “become like God” (Theaetetus 176b).
Apart from the question of how much “like God” a human could become,
the vertical dimension that Plato has projected provides the main alternative to
conceptions of God as distinguished from the world mainly by God’s great “power.”
Rather than thinking of God in terms of “power” as such, the Platonic tradition thinks
of God as distinguished specifically by the power to bring about what I call “reality
as oneself.” Since “power” as such seems to be a completely worldly or “natural”
characteristic, the Platonic conception of God as achieving reality as oneself has the
advantage of presenting a God who seems truly to go beyond the world or nature.
Plus, when this going beyond is understood on the analogy of the way persons
go beyond their appetites and emotions, in the unification of the three-part “soul,”
it gives us a conception of God not as in futile opposition to the world but as truly
and completely self-governed. That is, it gives us the kind of conception of God that
Hegel spelled out later, as we discussed in Chapter 4, and which Plato adumbrated
in a complex set of dialogues which we’ll discuss in the next two chapters.

Limits of the Republic

I have suggested that because it makes forgiveness possible, the search for what’s
really good can be the theme not only of unity within oneself but also of a unity
between oneself and other people. But what I’ve said in this chapter about unity
between oneself and other people has been my extrapolation of implications that I
find in the Republic, but which aren’t spelled out in it.
The Republic itself doesn’t explain very clearly how the search for what’s really
good unites people with each other. It really only opens the question up, with
its strange combination of radical equality and radical inequality: every soul is
capable of seeking the good, but only a few souls will do this reliably, and the
others must be lied to. In its political sections, the Republic exhibits what seems to
be a rather “controlling” response, on Plato’s part, to his multiple traumas.
In his Symposium, on the other hand, which we’ll consider in the next chapter,
Plato constructs a different model around the notion of “giving birth” in others.
This idea is intimately connected to the Republic’s theme of education and to
Plato’s well-known comparison of Socrates to a midwife (Theaetetus 149a-b).
According to the Symposium’s model, souls can and must relate, on a basis both of
fundamental equality and of truth-telling, with a number of others which has no
obvious limit. This model also lends itself very much to a philosophical theology
that understands the divine in terms of inner freedom and reality as oneself.
I’ll take up Plato’s account of love and “giving birth” in the next chapter, and his
explicit theology in Chapter 8.

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7 PLATO ON REASON, LOVE,
AND INSPIRATION

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. . .

JOHN KEATS, ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

ché ’l bene, in quanto ben, come s’intende, così accende amore, e tanto
maggio quanto più di bontate in sé comprende.
(For good, when understood as such, enkindles love, and more so the more
goodness it contains.)
DANTE, DIVINE COMEDY, PARADISO XXVI, 28

In this chapter and the next one I aim to do something that may well seem
impossible. I aim to reveal philosophy’s heart: to show how philosophy is
inseparable from love.
The academic philosophy that many of us have been exposed to seems to have
everything to do with the head, and little or nothing to do with the heart. Courses
introducing philosophy’s main topics seldom touch on love. The “philosophy of
love and sex,” which has nevertheless come into existence in the last few decades,
is a small subspecialty among twenty or thirty subspecialties of Anglo-American
philosophy. Of the “great” modern philosophers, only Hegel gives systematic
attention to love.1 In the nearly two centuries since Hegel, academic philosophy
has been preoccupied with the sciences, and secondarily with ethics and politics
and perhaps with the arts or religion. Love, which appears to be peripheral to all
of these, has not been a priority.2
This is no doubt part of what the German sociologist Max Weber called the
“disenchantment of the world,” which we have undergone in the age of science.
We perceive love as, at most, a personal experience, not as a fundamental reality.
So we let literature and psychology deal with it. Shakespeare’s comedies and Jane
Austen’s novels speak to us across the centuries because they remind us how
the experience of love can transform us and our world. But we think of such
transformations as merely “subjective,” having nothing to do with reality, as such.
Dante’s Divine Comedy constructed an entire worldview, a cosmos, around the
author’s experience of love. But no contemporary writer, it seems, could do that.
Probably, we suppose, only a Christian believer could do it.
Well, as a matter of fact, a Greek philosopher did it, before Christianity was
dreamed of. Love plays such a central role in Plato’s thought that he is sometimes
described, in a not too misleading formula, as simply a philosopher of love. And
I’m convinced that Plato was onto something here, which our recent philosophy
and culture have neglected to our great loss. Christianity, Dante, and the Romantic
poets were right to feel that love is a reality that is at least as deep as the reality that
the physical sciences reveal. Hegel was right to seek to vindicate this reality as an
aspect of philosophy or systematic knowledge. And Plato’s much earlier treatment
of this reality, in his Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium, penetrates as deeply into it as
any other writing that we have.

Reason, love, and inspiration

Since Plato is also correctly known as an arch-advocate of “reason,” we might well
wonder how the same writer can make central two things that seem to have as
little to do with each other as reason and love. Shouldn’t he rather have to choose
between them, as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, for example, is reputed
to have chosen reason, and the Romantics, by contrast, chose love?
I don’t know of any commentator who has made fully clear how reason and love
relate to each other in Plato.3 My own proposal will be that Plato’s development of
the idea of love, in Diotima’s speech in the Symposium, shows that love depends
upon the deep kind of “reason” that he analyzed in the Phaedo and the Republic.
So one of love’s essential ingredients is, in fact, the kind of reason that we have
been examining in the last two chapters. And it turns out, as we’ll see in the next
chapter, that the kind of reason that we have been examining likewise requires and
turns into love.
This intimate connection between reason and love is also essential to the
mystical theology that Plato suggests through Diotima’s speech, and of which
we get glimpses in other dialogues as well. For what emerges is that freedom,
love, immortality, and divinity are all based, as Plato presents them, on the deep
conception of reason and its role in human life that he expounds, especially,
in the Phaedo and the Republic. This deep conception of reason shows how we
are less separate from each other, and less separate from God, than we usually
assume we are. We are necessarily linked with each other and with God, through
reason/love.

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 Plato is aware that many people, when they hear of the role that he assigns to reason
in human life, will suspect that such a philosophy would take all of the inspiration
out of life. They’ll imagine that its conception of religion, if any, must be bleakly
“rationalistic.” Friedrich Schleiermacher and Soren Kierkegaard reacted to Hegel’s
conception of religion in this way. That’s not religion, they said, that’s philosophy.
They overlooked the central role of love and ecstasy in Hegel’s thinking, and how
it recapitulated the role of love and ecstasy in Plato. Similarly Friedrich Nietzsche,
ignoring the inspiration and ecstasy that Plato evokes in his Symposium and
Phaedrus, described Socrates and Plato as uninspired, constrained, “Appollonian”
rationalists in contrast to inspired, unconstrained, “Dionysian” irrationality.4
Probably one of Plato’s major goals in writing the Symposium, in particular,
was to head off the kind of misunderstanding of “reason” that Schleiermacher,
Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche exhibit. Plato aims to do this by showing how one of
our most inspiring experiences, the experience of sexual or romantic love, itself
implicitly involves something very much like the deep kind of reason that he
has been exploring in the Republic. And by showing, in the same stroke, how the
equally inspiring experience of mysticism involves that same deep kind of reason.
With regard to Plato’s conception of love in the Symposium, E. R. Dodds wrote
that Plato “never, as it seems to me, fully integrated this line of thought with the
rest of his philosophy; had he done so, the notion of the intellect as a self-sufficient
entity independent of the body might have been imperiled, and Plato was not
going to risk that.”5 I discussed the issue of the intellect’s “independence of the
body” in Chapter 5, and in this chapter I will show how closely Plato integrates his
conception of love with his conception of the intellect’s rational “ascent.”
If Plato shows, as I’m suggesting, that love, God, mysticism, and reason are
inseparable, then the many Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have used ideas
that originated in Plato as aids in their efforts toward developing a systematic
interpretation of their own sacred teachings were not mistaken in doing so. What
could be more inspiring than a demonstration that we don’t need to be drawn in
opposite directions by our reasoning and our love, because (on the contrary) true
reason necessarily leads to true love?

The setting of the Symposium

The Symposium presents itself as a report of a series of improvised speeches
given at a drinking party (Greek sym-posion=“drinking together”). Agathon, a
young Athenian aristocrat and poet whose play has just won the prize at one of
the festivals of Dionysus, is the host. The festivals of Dionysus were the events at
which the great Athenian tragedies and comedies were performed. Agathon was
a real person and a real playwright, but his plays aren’t among the ones that have
survived the intervening millennia for us to read.

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    159

 Dionysus, whose festival is being celebrated, is also known as “Bacchus.” He isn’t
one of the traditional Olympian gods. According to tradition, Dionysus’s worship
had a “barbarian,” non-Greek origin, and prominent male Greeks tried in vain to
resist it, when it first came to Greece. Dionysus interacted closely with his human
followers, especially women, through rites that are often described as “orgiastic.”
They are described in Euripides’s play, the “Bacchae.” According to one version of
Dionysus’s story, he was torn to pieces as an infant and eaten by the Titans, but his
heart was saved and he was reborn, so that he’s known as the “twice-born.” In this
way he anticipates the Christian theme of divine death and resurrection. Dionysus’s
worshippers reenacted his self-abandonment, dancing over the mountains under
the influence of wine and music, and sometimes tearing to pieces animals or unlucky
shepherds whom they might encounter. It may be that Plato sets the Symposium
during a festival of Dionysus so as to suggest that like eros, even the worship of this
wild god ultimately relies in an important way on reason.

Love in Athens
Another circumstance that sets Plato’s dialogues about love apart from most
modern writing on the subject is that love is understood here almost entirely as
a relationship between man and man. Women in classical Athens were excluded
from most education and public life, so that they seemed not to be capable of equal
partnership with men in anything, including love. Plato himself famously made
the suggestion, in book v of the Republic, that women could play an equal role
in public life and serve as “philosopher-kings,” but he expected most of his male
contemporaries to view this suggestion as plainly ridiculous—which (as we see,
for example, in Aristotle) they did.
As a result of this social setup, marriage in Athens was understood, as it has
been in many societies, primarily as a social, political, and child-producing
alliance, rather than a matter of romance. So romantic love was discovered
primarily outside marriage, and usually (as it was by another famous Greek writer,
Sappho) in homosexual relationships. Athens had a recognized form of man-
boy love, paederastia, to which allusions are made throughout the Symposium.
And although most men apparently settled down and married women at some
point, their homosexual romantic relationships sometimes extended outside the
marriage throughout their lives.6
So if we want to apply Plato’s account of love to heterosexual relationships
as well, or to relationships that take the form of marriage, we’ll need to take it
somewhat outside its original context. Which, however, turns out not to be
particularly difficult, since the issues and patterns that Plato identifies are of quite
a universal character.

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Eros
So the topic of the series of speeches that make up the Symposium is eros. The
atmosphere appears to be one of convivial banter, as one would expect at a drinking
party. But as James Rhodes points out in his illuminating account of the dialogue,
the other speakers have all been, in one way or another, at odds with Socrates
in other dialogues.7 Phaedrus, Pausanias, Erixymachus, and Agathon were all
introduced in Plato’s Protagoras as students of the prominent sophists, Hippias
and Prodicus. Pausanias and Agathon have since become students of the sophist
Gorgias, whom Socrates cross-examines in the dialogue that bears Gorgias’s name.
The sophists were itinerant teachers of social skills, basically how to influence
other people and get what you want. Protagoras was famous for his thesis that
“man is the measure of all things,” drawing no distinction between higher and
lower aspects of “man,” and Gorgias went further, maintaining that there is no
truth, but only opinions.
Socrates, by contrast, maintains that we want knowledge of what’s really good
(and thus what’s really “higher”), which can’t depend merely on our prior desires
or opinions. Since the Symposium features less Socratic cross-examination than the
Protagoras and Gorgias do, it doesn’t foreground Plato’s dispute with the sophists
in the way that those dialogues do. But that dispute is undoubtedly an issue just
beneath the surface of this dialogue as well.
As for the other two participants besides Socrates, Aristophanes, in his comedy,
the “Clouds,” had presented Socrates in a very unflattering light. Socrates in his
Apology says that the play probably contributed to the charges against which he is
defending himself at his trial and for which, as everyone knows, he was condemned
to death. And Plato regularly presents Alcibiades, the gifted and charismatic young
political and military leader, as not responding well to Socrates’s efforts to inspire
his interest in wisdom. So all six of the other participants in the Symposium have
affiliations or habits that are (at the very least) problematic, from Socrates’s point
of view.
The first three speakers talk about ways in which erotic relationships can
encourage behavior that’s commonly regarded as good. Phaedrus and Pausanias
talk about how lovers encourage each other to do admirable acts of self-sacrifice
on behalf of their city. Eryximachus, who is a doctor, describes the “orderly kind of
love” as a principle of physiological harmony, and of musical and cosmic harmony
as well.
All three of these speakers explicitly or implicitly contrast a good kind of love,
such as the “orderly kind,” with a bad kind of love, tracing love’s good effects to the
good kind of love, of course, rather than to the bad kind. They leave good and bad
unanalyzed, and they don’t address what makes both kinds of love “love,” so their
rather banal observations don’t illuminate love as such.

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    161

My “other half”
The subsequent speakers are Aristophanes; then Agathon, who is the host of the
party; then Socrates; and finally Alcibiades, who arrives late and drunk.
Aristophanes, in his speech, offers a myth of the origin of love which has a lot
of intuitive plausibility. Humans, he says, originally were spherical, with four legs,
two faces, and other double organs. So when Zeus became irritated with them for
having the ambition of mounting to heaven and attacking the gods, his solution
was to weaken them by splitting them in half, down the middle. The result of this
surgery is not only that humans now walk on two legs but also that each half of the
former sphere yearns for its lost other half.

And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own . . . then something
wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of
belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated
from one another, not even for a moment. These are the people who finish
out their lives together and still cannot say what it is that they want from one
another. No one would think it is the intimacy of sex—that mere sex is the
reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in being with the other. (192b-c)

“The people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is that
they want from one another”—this is indeed the mystery of being “in love,” that it’s
hard to explain its depth and intensity, in comparison to our other relationships.
We’re likely to feel that Aristophanes’s entertaining myth of the lost “other half ”
may be as good an explanation of this familiar mystery as we’re likely to get.
Certainly Plato makes it seem quite appealing.
But he himself is not satisfied with it. This becomes clear in the final planned
speech of the evening, Socrates’s speech. Most of Socrates’s speech is composed
of his report of what he says he was taught, early in his life, by a priestess from
Mantinea, whose name was Diotima.8 Socrates says that Diotima told him that

there is a certain story, according to which lovers are those people who seek
their other halves. But according to my story, a lover does not seek the half or
the whole unless, my friend, it turns out to be good as well. I say this because
people are even willing to cut off their own arms and legs if they are diseased. I
don’t think an individual takes joy in what belongs to him personally unless by
“belonging to me” he means “good.” . . . That’s because what everyone loves is
really nothing other than the good. (205e; emphasis added)

These comments remind us of Plato’s equally pivotal argument in the Republic

(505d) that people ultimately want for themselves what’s good, and not just
whatever they’re viscerally attracted to at the moment. Diotima is saying, in effect:

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Suppose that you discover that your mate, whom you think of as your “other
half,” is actually (unbeknownst to you) a conscienceless mass murderer. Then
your attachment to her, your feeling that she’s your “other half,” is likely to be
undermined, in a big way.
So evidently your feeling that your mate “belongs to you,” as your other half,
depends, at least to some extent, on your seeing him or her as good. If your arm or
leg becomes diseased and can’t be saved, or if you come to regard cunning not as
good but as bad, you’ll let go of the arm or the leg or the cunning mate whom you
previously admired, without feeling that you’ve lost “part of yourself.”
Why don’t we have this experience often, of discovering that what we thought
was our “other half ” is really not “part of us” at all? With most people who fall in
love, probably part of what causes them to fall in love is precisely the perception
that the person they’re falling in love with is, in fact, good. Meaning not only that
the person has pretty good habits but also that he’s actually interested, himself,
in learning more about what’s really good, so that when his partner makes some
progress on this subject, he’s glad to share in that learning process. This is why we
don’t often find one partner leaving the other behind, in terms of learning about
goodness, and having to conclude that the other person wasn’t really “part of
them,” after all. If their love for each other includes a love for the other’s interest in
learning about what’s good, then it will tend to be the case that they’ll share what
they learn, rather than one leaving the other behind.

Does Plato speak to the “intellectually

inclined” or to everyone?
There is an evident connection between Diotima’s discussion of what makes
another person my “other half,” and the agenda that I suggested that Plato has,
of showing that eros and “inspiration” aren’t ultimately irrational. Clearly, by
introducing the theme of “goodness,” Plato is creating a connection with “reason”:
with figuring out what is not merely desired but also truly good. This makes it
natural to wonder whether Plato at this point might have simply abandoned the
topic of the usual kind of eros, which is simple sexual desire. Has he just changed
the subject, so that he’s now addressing only would-be “philosophers,” as we might
call the people who care about goodness, and not people who are attracted by
Dionysian enthusiasm?
The answer, I believe, is that Plato supposes that the Dionysian enthusiast will
in fact want to claim that her life is a good one—indeed, the best one. She may not
want to invest her time in defending that claim, but she certainly relies on it. So
it’s not only “intellectuals” who are interested in the question of what’s really good.
Thus I disagree with Frisbee Sheffield’s suggestion that only those who are
“intellectually inclined” can be expected to be concerned with the question

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    163

of what’s really good.9 Our interpretation of what Plato means to say here will
determine whether we think his account of love is relevant to human experience in
general, or only to the experience of the relatively small group of humans who are
“intellectually inclined.” And this will determine whether we think Plato really has
anything to say to his fellow symposiasts, the sophists, who seem only superficially
“intellectually inclined,” and would probably admit (if they were candid) that they
are consciously much more interested in power and fame than in intellect as such.
My view is that in keeping with Socrates’s statements that the unexamined life is
not worth living (Apology of Socrates 38a) and that “everyone wants the things that
really are good, and disdains mere belief here” (Republic vi, 505d), we should assume
that Plato’s basic view is that knowledge of what really is good is a universal human
need. Though the ability to pursue such knowledge in a systematic and explicit way
is no doubt much less widespread. The sophists need knowledge of what’s really
good as much as anyone needs it, in that they certainly want to believe that the lives
that they envisage for themselves are in fact the best lives for human beings.

Eros as “reproduction”
To make his case about the nature of eros more concrete, Plato now has Diotima
turn to a more detailed discussion of familiar features of love. Diotima proposes to
Socrates that love is not just wanting what’s good but wanting to have it “forever”
(206a). The way we mortals can do this, Diotima says, is through “reproduction,”
which is “everlasting and immortal as far as is possible for something mortal”
(206e–207a). We are “pregnant . . . both in body and in soul” (206c), and we seek
either through bodily procreation or by educating another person to “give birth in
beauty” (206b) to something that’s like ourselves.
We do this, Diotima says, even within the limits of our own individual body,
since our “manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains and fears” are
always passing away and needing to be replaced. We seek to replace them, she
says, with manners, customs, and so forth that are like the ones that we have now
(207e–208b). And beyond the life of our own body, some of us seek to have physical
offspring, and others, who are “pregnant in soul,” try to inspire in younger people
manners, customs, and so forth that are like our own. Poets, such as Homer and
Hesiod, and lawgivers, such as Lycurgus and Solon, are particularly successful at
doing this, and famous for it. Their soul-children, Diotima says, are in fact “more
immortal” (209c) than the children of those who are merely pregnant in body.
The most important question that’s raised by this rich passage is this: If we
want to reproduce ourselves, as Diotima says, why should we particularly want to
reproduce our souls, our “manners, customs, opinions,” and so forth, by educating
other people, rather than just reproducing our bodies, by having physical offspring?
Why are soul-children “more immortal” than ordinary offspring?

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Why are soul-children “more immortal”?
Diotima mentions that “shrines” have been set up to honor people like Homer,
Hesiod, Lycurgus, and Solon, the great Greek poets and lawgivers, who “beget
virtue” in others, but not for people who simply have physical offspring (210a).
But she doesn’t explain why a person shouldn’t be satisfied with the “immortality,
remembrance and happiness” that nevertheless do appear to go with ordinary
physical procreation (208e).
The Greek appetite for “immortal fame,” which seems to be part of her answer,
in its turn raises the same issue. Why do people often attach greater importance to
“fame” than they attach to having biological descendants?
It’s not too difficult to explain why we should want to reproduce our souls in
particular, as Diotima says the poets and lawgivers do, if we remember Plato’s
account, in Republic book iv, of what it takes to make a person “one.” Plato argued
there that it’s only when the appetites, the “spirited” part, and the rational part of a
person’s soul are harmonized under the leadership of the rational part, that “from
having been many things he becomes entirely one,” and can act as such (443d).
This was because only the rational part had the ability to understand each of the
other parts in such a way that it could harmonize all three of them.
What this has to do with reproducing our souls, in the form of our manners,
customs, opinions, and virtues, is that these “soul” features are features that
can reflect the functioning of the rational part, in particular. They reflect the
functioning of the rational part insofar as a person may decide to act and think in
certain ways, and such decisions can reflect thinking, rather than just the feelings
provoked by appetites and the “spirited” part.
This is important because insofar as these decisions do reflect thinking, they
are capable of reflecting the person himself, as “entirely one,” rather than just
some part of him, as the functioning of the appetites or the spirited part alone
would do. Decisions made by the rational part reflect the person himself because
the rational part is the part that’s capable of harmonizing the three parts of the
soul into one person. Consequently, it’s possible for “soul” features like manners,
customs, opinions, and virtues to reflect the person himself, as a whole, in a way
that merely physical features, like height, shape, and so forth, don’t. Physical
features, presumably, are more likely to be determined by the person’s biological
heritage, and thus by at most one part of him.
There’s no guarantee, of course, that “soul” features like manners, customs,
opinions, and virtues will reflect the person’s thinking and thus reflect the person
himself. They could reflect mainly the effects on him of people around him, his
childhood environment, and that sort of thing. But they can reflect his thinking
and thus himself, whereas physical features, in general, probably can’t.
And this, I suggest, is probably why Plato’s Diotima thinks that a thoughtful
person won’t be satisfied with the “immortality, remembrance and happiness” that

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    165

appear to go with ordinary physical procreation. For that sort of remembrance
won’t, in general, reflect the person himself, who’s being “reproduced.” Of course,
biological offspring can reflect the procreator himself if they’re educated by
him, but this simply shows that education is what really counts here, rather than
procreation as such.
This probably also explains why Diotima thinks that soul-children are “more
immortal” than ordinary offspring. Presumably this is another way of saying that
soul-children (and their soul-children, and so on) are likely to reflect the parent
himself, in a way that biological children don’t necessarily do. So that someone
who seeks to reproduce himself or herself will do best to educate, and not merely
to procreate.
This would also be Diotima’s explanation of the fact that many people prefer
having fame to having biological descendants. For fame presumably reflects one’s
choices in life, and thus one’s thinking and one’s “self,” in a way that biological
reproduction, as such, does not.
My interpretation of Diotima’s preference for “soul-children” as being due to the
fact that soul-children reflect the “parent’s” thinking and thus her self in a way that
physical children don’t has an important consequence. It means that interpreters
who take the Symposium to advocate the simple rejection of individuality, in favor
of a supposedly mystical “earlier state of unity,” are mistaken. Rather than rejecting
individuality, the Symposium preserves it and goes beyond it.10 This feature of
Plato’s account is of major importance for anyone who’s interested in getting clear
about love and mystical reality. For it shows how a loving unity with all of reality
need not involve ceasing to think for oneself.
Before exploring these questions further, we need to bring out a further parallel
to the Republic. Remembering Diotima’s earlier emphasis on the role of the good,
in particular, in love, we might want to ask another question about her discussion
of “reproduction.” Does a person really want to reproduce all of her (physical and
social) features, in her future self and in other people, or does she only want to
reproduce those that she regards as admirable or good?

“Me” or my good qualities?

To ask this question is practically to answer it. I surely don’t want my future self
or my child or my protégé to have the same birthmarks and the same amount of
irrational anger that I possess. What I want them to inherit from me is those of my
features that I regard as desirable. If they inherit those, as a result of my efforts, I’ll
feel that they’ve reproduced me in the only way that I care about being reproduced.
So not only is the reproduction of “soul”-qualities more important than the
reproduction of physical qualities. Among “soul”-qualities, the ones whose
reproduction is truly important to me will be the ones that seem to me to be

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desirable or good. The reason they’re most important is, again, precisely that what
seems to me to be desirable or good is what I myself have chosen and tried to
acquire, or will choose and try to acquire. Thus these qualities are the ones that
most of all will reflect me. That’s why the qualities that I regard as desirable are
also the ones that, if I contribute to their embodiment in another person, will
reproduce me in that other person.
Diotima doesn’t explicitly raise this question of whether a person wants to
reproduce all of his physical and social features, or only those that he regards
as admirable or good. But she seems to realize that it follows naturally from her
earlier emphasis on the role of the good. This is evident from the fact that the final
part of her talk describes eros as itself addressing precisely the issue of what is truly
desirable.

First [a lover] should love one body . . . then he should realize that the beauty
of one body is brother to the beauty of any other. . . . The beauty of all bodies is
one and the same. When he grasps this, he must become a lover of all beautiful
bodies. . . . After this he must think that the beauty of people’s souls is more
valuable than the beauty of their bodies. . . . [After this] our lover will be forced
to gaze at the beauty of activities and laws, and to see that all this is akin to itself.
. . . After customs he must move on to various kinds of knowledge . . . [so that]
the lover is turned to the great sea of beauty, and gazing upon this, he gives
birth to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories . . . [until finally] he comes
to know just what it is to be beautiful. (210a–211d)

This ascent, which Diotima compares to “rising stairs” (211c), is bound to

remind us of the ascent of the Cave-dweller, in the Republic, to knowledge of
the Good.11 As in the Republic, Plato doesn’t spell out just what it is that drives
the climber from one step to the next higher one. Why “must” he think that the
beauty of people’s souls is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies? Why
“must” he move from activities and laws to various kinds of knowledge, ideas,
and theories?
The simplest explanation of these steps is that the climber is seeking knowledge,
as Plato says at the end of the passage, of “just what it is to be beautiful,” or, as we
might also put it, of just what it is that he loves in the original beautiful body. In
the first step, he realizes that “the beauty of all bodies is one and the same”—that
what he loves in his first love isn’t unique but is a quality that it shares with other
beautiful bodies. In the second step, souls, which we know through their “activities
and laws” and their “ideas and theories,” exhibit beauty more clearly than bodies
do, because qualities of the soul are likely to have been chosen precisely because of
their beauty.12 And “knowledge, ideas and theories” are even more likely to have
been chosen in this way than activities and laws, since activities and laws may be
merely conventional.

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    167

Why “all beautiful bodies” and
not just one?
Before we get to any of these higher stages of the “ascent,” though, we might
wonder whether the “lover” must really “become a lover of all beautiful bodies”?
Isn’t “love” proverbially exclusive and blind to the virtues of other individuals than
the one with whom one is “in love”? Has Plato replaced the experience of eros, as
ordinary people know it, with the very unusual experience of (so to speak) a “born
philosopher,” who for some peculiar reason is in love with universals, rather than
with particular human beings?13
The answer to this natural question is contained in the context of the ascent,
in the discussion of “reproduction” and its pursuit of the next best thing to
immortality, to which Diotima has given so much attention. There is every reason
to think that Diotima is deepening the account that she has given in the first part
of her exposition, rather than turning away to something that renders the first part
irrelevant.
And the way she’s deepening it is by answering our last question, about the role
of the good in reproduction. She explains that a person who seeks to reproduce
“herself ” will determine what her true self is by determining what she really thinks
is “beautiful.” She won’t want to reproduce her merely accidental qualities like her
taste in ice cream or her excessive anger at politicians, because she doesn’t really
think those are beautiful, and consequently she doesn’t think of them as really
“herself.” Nor will she want to reproduce her bodily features as much as she’ll want
to reproduce her activities and ideas and so forth, because her activities and ideas
will represent her more than her body can represent her.14
This whole attitude to “reproduction” presupposes that a person can, in fact,
distinguish between parts of herself that are relatively accidental and external and
parts of herself that do indeed reflect her own thought. It presupposes that there is
such a thing as thought about what’s really “beautiful” or desirable. So this is what
Diotima now seeks to demonstrate, with her story about the “ascent” to knowledge
of the beautiful.
What I’m suggesting, then, is that eros certainly can address itself to particular
human beings. But nevertheless, Plato is suggesting, eros isn’t totally “blind”
but wants to think of what it’s attracted to as genuinely beautiful (or “fine”) and
wants therefore to have an idea of what genuine beauty (or “fineness”) is. And
I’m suggesting that this dimension of eros particularly emerges when the lover is
wondering what sort of influence to exercise on the beloved individual. It emerges
when the lover is wondering which of the beloved’s qualities to encourage—
because the lover really does love those qualities, in the beloved and in herself—
and which of the beloved’s qualities to try to help the beloved to rise above. That
is, it emerges in the context of what Diotima calls “giving birth” or “reproduction.”

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How to influence the beloved?
Why does this issue arise at all, of how to “influence” the beloved? It’s certainly
not an obvious part of the usual narratives of romantic love, say, in “Tristan
and Isolde” or “Romeo and Juliet” or Wuthering Heights. Does Plato’s interest in
the issue of how one should influence one’s beloved show that he’s really just a
“schoolmaster,” rather than someone who actually knows something about the
inspired experience of eros?
Plato’s answer to these questions is, first, that because the lover wants to
possess what’s truly good, the lover must have some conception of what it is that’s
good (or in this case, “beautiful”). Plus, since love “wants to possess the good for
ever” (206a), the lover will encourage his beloved to continue to embody and to
develop this quality that’s truly good. Love may be proverbially blind, but it’s also
proverbially possessive. It wants not to be a transient episode, but to have its object
forever. But to understand what it is to have something forever, we must have some
idea of what that something is. But if a lover has such an idea, then his eros is not
blind! It has an “intellectual” dimension.
Where else does love poetry come from, if not from the desire to express
what it is that fascinates the lover, in his or her beloved? It’s famously difficult,
as Aristophanes says, to articulate “what it is that they want from one another”
(192c). But we seek to do it nevertheless, and the beloved feels more loved, not less,
when her lover is able to articulate some of what it is that he finds fascinating in
her. And what he praises, he obviously encourages, and “reproduces,” to the extent
that he possesses it himself.
Thus, I submit, Plato’s discovery of an “intellectual” dimension in eros isn’t just
a schoolmaster’s projection. It’s an articulation of something that we’re all familiar
with, on one level or another. If you have no idea whatever of what it is that
fascinates you, and what you want to praise (and thus encourage), then it’s open to
question whether you’re really in love.
Eros’s intellectual dimension is illustrated by the famous final section of the
Symposium, in which the drunken Alcibiades crashes the party and, in his speech,
confesses his love for Socrates. Alcibiades doesn’t just say that he’s fascinated by
this particular person. He also says a great deal about what it is that fascinates him
in Socrates, namely, his good humor, his stoicism in the face of hardship, his great
mental fertility and passion for the truth, his inner life, and his ability to make
Alcibiades himself ashamed of his own moral and intellectual flightiness.
Here Alcibiades shows us both the intellectual dimension of his own love and
the unfortunate failure of that intellectual dimension to bring him to emulate
his beloved, by giving birth to deeds that would be in keeping with virtues like
Socrates’s. The readers of the Symposium, which was written years after the time
that it depicts, were all very aware that Alcibiades had in the meantime turned out
to be a traitor to Athens, who joined its enemies when his schemes for glory as an

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    169

Athenian leader didn’t pan out. He had also been accused of desecrating Athenian
religious statues and the Eleusinian mysteries.15
All of these were actions that no one could possibly imagine Socrates himself
engaging in. So that evidently Alcibiades’s admiration for Socrates’s virtues
had failed to triumph over Alcibiades’s love of his own bodily beauty and fame.
Apparently Alcibiades had some sort of hidden issue which made his personal
beauty and charisma more important to him than such things were to Socrates.
He wasn’t able to focus fully on the virtues because of the continual distraction
that this concern for his beauty and fame represented for him. So that despite his
admiration for Socrates’s virtues, Alcibiades failed, ultimately, to make the crucial
step in Diotima’s “ladder” from love of particular instances of “beauty” or virtue
to love of all of their instances16—which would have caused him to try to cultivate
virtues (inner beauty) like Socrates’s in himself.
So we see that the presence of an intellectual dimension in eros doesn’t
guarantee that the person who experiences eros will in fact make the “ascent,” up
that dimension, that Plato describes. But that dimension is, nevertheless, always
implicitly present in eros as we experience it, because to love something is to praise
it, and thus to regard it as truly good; and we all know that only the intellect is in a
position fully to address the question of what is truly good.
So Diotima’s depiction of the “ascent” of eros to the knowledge of the beautiful
or the good is in no way imposed upon the official topic of the Symposium. It’s
an articulation of the goal of loving something that we have a reason to love,
because it’s truly beautiful or good. And this goal is apparently an integral part of
eros as such, because it’s only in this way that we possess the good and continue
to possess it.17

Reason inherent in inspiration: Value

And this brings us back to the agenda that I suggested we would find in the
Symposium: to show that reason is an inherent feature of some of the highest states
of inspiration that we experience, namely, those of love. It seems that by bringing
out the “intellectual dimension” of love which he reveals through Diotima’s
discussion of “reproduction” and “ascent,” Plato has indeed followed through on
this agenda.
He hasn’t shown, of course, that we fall in love as a result of cold calculation.
That would eliminate love’s “inspiration” aspect. What he has shown is that when
we’re inspired or intoxicated by a relationship, it’s not because we’ve been hit by
a purely random arrow from Cupid’s bow. Rather, it’s because we sense a kinship
with the other person, which has something to do with a conception of value.
In the most primitive cases, it may be a conception of the value simply of
physical beauty. But insofar as it’s a conception, a specification of what is beautiful

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or fine, it can’t identify that value solely by reference to its one possessor, but must
acknowledge that it can in principle be exhibited by many. As a conception, it
implicitly opens the general question of what value (fineness) in a person really is.
What is the real content of the “kinship” between the lover and the beloved—of
the conception of value that one or both of them instantiates, and that they both
recognize as valid? That question is the fundamentally “intellectual” issue that, it
now seems, is inherent in love, as such.
The only way eros can be kept separate from conceptions of value, and (thus)
from the intellect, is if it’s reduced to what we might call sheer mindless “lust.”
We do often speak of sex as a “blind force of nature.” A virtue of Sigmund Freud’s
writing about sex is that he recognized that sex can be (as he called it) “sublimated”
into higher cultural forms such as romantic love and the arts and the sciences.18
The role of admiration and praise in erotic relationships, to which Plato draws our
attention, helps us to understand how this “sublimation” occurs. After all, we can get
“sexual release” without involving another person at all. So it seems that our interest
in sex that involves us with another person is directed at something more than the
mere satisfaction of an appetite (as in “sheer mindless lust”). That something more
is (presumably) a specific kind of relationship, responding to and “giving birth” to
specific positive qualities in another human being. We love to “give birth” to what
we admire. The celebration and creativity that are characteristic of the arts and the
sciences seem to be additional, analogous processes of appreciating, responding,
and “giving birth.” That’s the sense in which they are “sublimated” forms of “sex.”
It’s probably evident from what I’ve been saying that “sex” or eros, for Plato,
is not simply a matter of penetration, ejaculation, or orgasm. Instead he speaks
of pregnancy, giving birth, and reproduction, and thus (as I’ve been putting it)
of relationships of appreciating, responding, and encouraging. In the Republic,
Plato describes the philosopher as having “intercourse” with what really is and
“begetting understanding and truth,” thus “truly living” and only after all of this
being “relieved from the pains of giving birth” (490b). The mixture of normally
male and normally female roles, in all of this, is striking. As eros rises above
mere biology, it appears to become androgynous. In any case, it’s productive, and
oriented toward appreciation and truth. Plato is drawing on a broad sense of eros,
which will probably speak to people who’ve had some experience of life, and not
only of masturbation and “hooking up.” It evidently spoke to Freud, who wrote
that “what psychoanalysis calls sexuality . . . had far more resemblance to the all-
inclusive and all-embracing love of Plato’s Symposium.”19
Unfortunately, Freud (no doubt reflecting the philosophical climate of his
time) didn’t see how Plato’s “all-embracing love” depends upon intellect, as the
faculty that does the evaluation that’s reflected in love’s characteristic appreciation,
encouragement, and “giving birth.” So Freud didn’t give a role to intellect or
intellectual ascent in his models of psychic functioning nor have most of his
successors in psychological theory done this.

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    171

 Freud’s failure to understand the role of intellect in love as explained by
Diotima’s speech was probably especially a result of the influence on him and
his contemporaries of Arthur Schopenhauer’s entirely biological account of love,
in which Schopenhauer depicts lovers as duped by the needs of their species for
reproduction.20 Here Schopenhauer ignores the two topics to which Diotima
gives particular attention, namely, the (non-biological) reproduction of virtues, or
“soul-reproduction,” and the intellectual ascent by which we seek to clarify what
the “virtues” really are.
In general, while Schopenhauer appropriated terminology from Plato and from
Kant, he ignored the context that gave that terminology its significance, as in Plato’s
account of rational self-government in Republic books iv-vii and the Symposium,
and Kant’s account of the same topic in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals. But Schopenhauer’s confident writing and his apparently disillusioning
and thus liberating pessimism, including his brutally “candid” account of love,
made his work very influential in Germany for a long time.
Biology is indeed liberating insofar as it shows us what we have in common with
other species. For full freedom necessarily seeks truth. Biology only ceases to be
liberating when this commonality is over-generalized in a reductionist or dualistic
manner and prevents us from seeing the vertical dimension, the “sublimation,”
that Plato and his successors identify in the natural and spiritual world. Laboring
under Schopenhauer’s influence, Nietzsche and Freud did not regain access
to Plato’s or Kant’s (or Hegel’s) central concerns, their pursuit of wholeness or
freedom through rational ascent. Though Freud was evidently drawn to Plato’s
account of love, he remained vague about its actual content because he had no
access to Plato’s notions of rational self-government and intellectual ascent, and of
eros as admiration and encouragement and thus as involving intellect.
If Plato is right in viewing intellectual ascent as a crucial feature of our experience
of love, then our omission of it leaves a major gap in our understanding of human
functioning. Much of the responsibility for this omission, in the course of the last
two centuries, belongs to anti-“intellectual” Romantics like Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, who have followed Plato’s Aristophanes in viewing inspiration as the
antithesis of intellect. It’s unfortunately not surprising that Freud and the rest of
us have been so impressed by this simple and powerful antithesis that we regularly
overlook the equally simple feature of erotic inspiration that Plato and Hegel are
trying to bring to our attention. Namely, that we are inspired not by just anything
but by what we perceive as in some way “good,” admirable, and therefore inspiring.21
We need to resist our natural tendency to “ideologize,” to embrace a theory
that speaks to one powerful feeling that we have (in this case, to intoxication or
inspiration) while ignoring other features of our experience (in this case, the role
of intellect in inspiration). A valuable byproduct of paying closer attention to these
other features will be that we’ll have much more access not just to Plato but to
the whole tradition of Platonic thought and poetry up through the seventeenth

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century. From Plotinus through Rumi, Dante, Nicolas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino,
George Herbert, G. W. Leibniz, and the Cambridge Platonists, the members of this
tradition all presuppose that love, inspiration, and reason are inseparable in the
way that Plato points out, and which our own “scientifically” anti-intellectual age
finds so counterintuitive.

Reason/value in love stories

But if Plato is right about the role of intellect within our most inspired states,
why do such great love stories as “Tristan and Isolde,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and
Wuthering Heights not seem to bring such a dimension to our attention? Why
do they focus, instead, on love’s apparently least “rational” aspects: its obsessive
quality, its disregard for death and other-worldly obstacles?
First of all, of course, these stories are meant to emphasize love’s inspiration
or intoxication, so as to distinguish it sharply from the sort of rationality that
simply calculates how to achieve a predetermined goal. The heroes and heroines
of these stories abandon, or sharply compromise, whatever predetermined goals
they may have had, in order to immerse themselves in and celebrate the “kinship”
that they’ve discovered. That is, our great love stories play the same role for us
that the Dionysian cult played for the Greeks: they remind us of the shallowness
of conventional “rationality,” and they remind us of the value that we do attach to
experiences of inspiration and intoxication.
But this doesn’t by any means imply that they exclude the dimension of value,
and thus implicitly of reason or intellect, that Plato finds in love. When these stories
celebrate the “connection” that the lovers have discovered, which may lead them
even into the jaws of death, they inevitably raise the question, What is it in her (or
him) that fascinates him (or her)? And they answer that question. Tristan is the
truest knight, Isolde is the fairest maiden, Romeo is the most dashing youth, Juliet
is the most blooming maiden, Heathcliff is the most passionate and authentic, the
least “conventional” young man, and Cathy is the most passionate and authentic
young woman.
These specific qualities are presented as deserving of admiration and, if possible,
emulation. They are, in effect, visions of what a life well lived must contain. In
each case, the lovers share this vision—modulated, to varying degrees, for differing
gender roles. It’s what constitutes their connection, or bond, or “kinship.” Without
it, the connection would be unintelligible. With it, we can understand why the
connection assumes such a paramount role in their lives. Each of them feels that a
life lived in this connection and celebrating it is incomparably more valuable than
a life lived outside it.
Plato’s Aristophanes would say that the nature of the connection is simply
ineffable, and can only be explained by resort to a mythical prehistory in which

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    173

the two protagonists shared one body. Plato’s Diotima says, on the contrary, the
connection is a function of their shared values, in which they each seek to embody
what’s truly beautiful or “fine.” Because they seek this, and because they succeed
in it to a greater degree than the other people around them, they’re “fated,” we all
feel, to connect.
Why is this connection so much more important for them than the value, say,
of a long life full of creature comforts? And why do we, as onlookers, feel that their
connection is of great importance for us? The lovers each feel that through their
connection they achieve the “nearest thing to immortality” that they, as mortals,
can achieve, because through it they break out of the limits of one finite human
life, into a shared life that contains, in principle, all life.
It “contains all life” because we, the onlookers, feel the same thing: that through
their relationship, the lovers break the bonds of finite human life on our behalf.
Their relationship takes us all, to some degree, out of our finitude. It’s not merely
that they show us what might happen to us, as individuals; more importantly,
they prove to us that the finitude of lives in general, including our own, is a
superficial phenomenon. Their charisma is reflected on us; it shows that we aren’t
the humdrum birth-to-death plodders that we tend otherwise to think we are.
This, I think, is why all of us, even those who are maximally indifferent to the
propaganda machines of Hollywood and the fashion industry, find romantic love
such a fascinating phenomenon.

How to nurture inspiration?

I hardly need to add that this fascination that we have leads us, in many if not most
cases, to underestimate the sheer work that’s required to make a relationship, or a
marriage, “work.” We imagine that because the result is transcendent, the means
to the result are simply magical—even though hard experience continually shows
us that this isn’t the case. Given the now pretty long and often painful history
of marriages based on visions of romance, it’s natural to imagine that maybe the
guiding idea of “passion” is hopelessly misleading if it’s thought to provide a basis
for marriage. Indeed, there’s a tendency among love poets, such as those of the
courtly love and “Tristan and Isolde” traditions, to conceive of romance in a way
that makes it essentially incompatible with marriage.22
The tendency to conceive of eros “dualistically” as the opposite of everyday life,
as the Tristan poets do, is probably the permanent danger to which the romantic
love complex is exposed. In Plato’s Symposium, the speech that corresponds to this
Tristan dualism would be Aristophanes’s, which ascribes the kinship between the
lovers to their having originally shared a body, in a way that ordinary reason can’t
hope to understand. This kinship comes, as it were, from “outside” the world that
we can understand, so that the only thing that can “explain” it is a myth. That being

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the case, there’s no way for the people involved to nurture it, promote it, or deepen
it. It’s a gift from the gods; you either have it or you don’t.
If that’s what romantic love is, there’s bound to be a lot of wishful thinking and
a lot of painful disillusionment around it. If, however, Diotima is right in insisting,
against Aristophanes, that eros has an inherent “intellectual” dimension, which is
the lover’s perception that his beloved has qualities that he too seeks to have and to
promote, then the situation is different. Then there’s room for shared work, within
the relationship, that can tend to nurture, promote, and deepen the relationship,
by nurturing and promoting the qualities that it’s based on. “Inspiration” isn’t
simply a bolt from the blue; it can, in fact, be nurtured.
One modern writer who shows us how love involves a kind of reason that can
be nurtured by interaction is Jane Austen. No doubt one reason why many of us
find Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility inspiring is that Austen shows
unusually well how constructive the relationship between erotic inspiration and
reason can be: how they can constitute a single “education of love.” While at the
same time she convinces us that the eros that she’s describing is genuine—that the
parties are not being “rational” in the usual, boring sense of “calculating.”
One wonders what the passionate Friedrich Nietzsche might have learned
from Miss Austen’s novels, if he had encountered them. To merely dismiss them,
say because they end in marriage and “happily ever after” or because their main
protagonists are female, would be a major intellectual error. When marriage is
expected to reflect and embody intelligent eros, having a successful marriage is
one of the major accomplishments that an adult of either sex can have.

“There if anywhere should a person live

his life, beholding that Beauty”
Having explored some of what seem to me to be the most important implications
of Diotima’s speech, I now need to consider another aspect of her presentation,
which dominates many interpretations. In contrast to the ascent from the Cave
in Republic vii, in which the ascender eventually descends again into the Cave
to share what he has learned, the Symposium’s “rising stairs” from 210a to 211d
sound pretty much as though they are a one-way trip. The person who becomes
a lover of all beautiful bodies is said to “despise . . . this wild gaping after just one
body” (210b). The person who loves souls and activities and laws looks “mainly
not at beauty in a single example, as a servant would who favored the beauty of
a little boy or a man or a single custom (being a slave, of course, he’s low and
small-minded)” (210d). And when the climber finally “catches sight of something
wonderfully beautiful in its nature,” and “comes to know just what it is to be
beautiful,” Diotima concludes, “There if anywhere should a person live his life,
beholding that Beauty” (211d).

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    175

 These features of Diotima’s speech have led some readers to suppose that
the bliss of the climber who reaches this summit is such that he no longer has
any interest in individual human beings as such and won’t, for example, have a
particular human lover. However, Diotima makes one further remark that makes
one wonder:

Only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue
(because he’s in touch with no images), but to true virtue (because he is in touch
with the true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given
birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become
immortal, it would be he (212a).

So here the theme of “giving birth” returns again, together with the theme of
possible immortality. Why should the climber who has arrived at the summit,
and can “live” in the sight of perfect Beauty, have any interest in giving birth to
anything? And why should he have any interest in his own personal “immortality”?
I’m going to return to this issue, and the general issue of “returning to the Cave,”
in the next chapter, where we’ll also discuss the “demiurge” or craftsman in Plato’s
Timaeus. The demiurge is a divine figure who finds a reason to do more than just
contemplate the Forms, and who thus models a kind of “descent” into dealings
with individuals.
In the meantime, I simply suggest that the analysis that I’ve given of “birth in
beauty,” with the features that Diotima gives it, shows that it has a major relevance
to our experience of loving other individuals. I’ll use the remainder of this chapter
to respond to issues that critics of the idea have raised, and thus develop its
relevance in more detail.

Why Platonic love is not self-centered

Reading Socrates’s and Diotima’s account of love as seeking to satisfy a personal
lack (Symposium 200–05), influential critics have wondered whether this “love”
isn’t purely egoistic, self-centered. In the 1930s, the Swedish scholar Anders
Nygren contrasted this egoism, which he thought was characteristic of “pagan”
culture, with the unconditional agape love that he said was ascribed to God in
the Bible. More recently, Gregory Vlastos and Martha Nussbaum interpreted
Diotima’s account of “birth in beauty” and of the way in which legislators and
poets have benefitted numerous generations as, likewise, egoistic, since Diotima
describes this birth in beauty as producing the “nearest thing to immortality” for
mortals. The lover that Diotima describes, they said, loves ultimately only himself
and the Forms and what he can “create” in their image. There is no love here of the
other person, for her own sake.23

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 To begin with, Plato doesn’t speak of “creating” any part of one’s beloved.
Rather, the lover “gives birth,” which is to say that an independent being comes
into existence, who is influenced by the lover only in that the new being herself
takes an interest in the Good.
The notion of the lover as wanting to “reproduce” himself in the beloved
does, at first glance, look self-centered. But as I’ve explained, this “reproduction”
is not of the lover’s idiosyncratic characteristics, his height and weight and taste
in ice cream. Rather, it’s of the lover’s universal characteristic: his love of what’s
truly Good, through which (as we know from Republic iv-vii) the lover is self-
governing.24 Because the new being likewise loves what’s Good, the new being is
likewise self-governing.
And it’s only through this self-government that the lover can correctly see the
new being as “reproducing” his own love of the Good. It’s only by “giving birth to”
a truly self-governing being that the lover can achieve what he’s seeking to achieve.
So the lover must love his beloved as a truly self-governing being, and not as a
product of his efforts or of his personal preferences.
This is the paradox of teaching: that the teacher wants his student to become a
genuine master, rather than someone who perfectly parrots the teacher’s words. As
Buddhists say, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”—don’t imitate him.
The Buddha doesn’t want imitations of himself, and neither does a true teacher or
a Platonic lover.
To say that the lover wants the beloved to be self-governing is not to say that
he’s indifferent to what the beloved will choose. He wants her to choose the Good.
But he wants this not because the Good is what he himself happens to choose,
but because only the pursuit of the Good can make her self-governing and thus
independent of her antecedents and environment, as he is (or tries to be).25
When we see how the pursuit of the Good makes a person self-governing, we
see how the Platonic lover’s self-“reproduction” is not egoistic. In the Symposium,
Plato doesn’t mention as he does in Republic book iv the way in which the pursuit
of the Good makes a person self-governing (“concerned with what is truly himself
and his own . . . he becomes entirely one” [443d]). But he must have it in mind,
because without it, his account of interpersonal love would indeed not resemble
anything that we can understand as interpersonal love.
When we bring this idea of self-government through pursuit of the Good over
from the Republic to help us to understand the Symposium’s conception of love as
soul-“reproduction,” we are following the principle of interpretive charity. That
principle advises us to prefer whatever interpretation makes the most sense of a
writer’s texts. Such charity in this case has two payoffs. First, it enables us to explain
why Diotima regards “soul”-reproduction as preferable to bodily reproduction.
She regards “soul”-reproduction as preferable because it reproduces one’s choices,
which, more than one’s body, reflect oneself as “entirely one.” And second, as I’ve
just shown, it finds in Diotima’s speech something that we can understand as love

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    177

for the other person herself, as self-governing, as opposed to a concern that’s really
only for oneself.
So we make Plato’s thought intelligible. And into the bargain we get the insight
that I described, into our experience of love. Nobody wants his beloved to mimic
himself, and at the same time nobody is indifferent to what his beloved seeks and
chooses. In the people we love, we love and seek to encourage precisely the free
pursuit of what is truly Good. How else could we say that we truly love them?
This, then, is my response to Vlastos’s and Nussbaum’s complaint that Diotima
doesn’t appear to describe love of particular persons for their own sake. Only a
person who pursues the Good is self-governing and fully realized as a person. A
person who seeks to “reproduce herself ” will seek to reproduce her full reality,
which is her self-government, and will thus seek to produce a person who pursues
the Good. Because she seeks to produce the other as self-governing, she will love the
other as one who is or can become self-governing, and not as a mere reproduction
of herself. And loving another as self-governing is surely a way of loving the other
for his own sake, rather than for the sake of something other than him.
Jonathan Lear thinks it’s clear that in Diotima’s account of love, “beautiful
individuals have only instrumental value: they are to be used, stepped on, like rungs
in a ladder which leads away from any concern for them” (Lear [1998], p. 163). I
have explained that Diotima and Socrates are concerned about individuals in that
they seek to give birth to self-government in them, by encouraging their pursuit of
beauty or the Good. Thus the ladder leads not away from these individuals but to
what they most deeply need. Like Vlastos and Nussbaum, Lear neglects Diotima’s
critique of Aristophanes’s conception of love, by which Plato makes it clear how
all love celebrates what it takes to be truly Good and thus how all love requires the
ascent that Diotima and Socrates preach.
When we see how the pursuit of the Good makes a person self-governing, we
see how the “reproductive” love that Diotima describes serves everyone’s self-
realization, rather than making (some of) us puppets of someone or something
that’s alien to us.26 Thus we see how the love that Diotima analyzes is in fact the
love of others for their own sake, which we all experience.
And we also see how the ascent to the “sea of beauty” (210d) and to true Beauty,
which Diotima describes, serves self-government or individuality rather than (as
is often supposed) eliminating it. That is, we see how Plato’s “mysticism” (and, I
would suggest, all true mysticism) goes beyond individuality by perfecting it, rather
than by abolishing it. Which should be a salutary lesson to the wayward gurus and
guru-followers who imagine that “enlightenment” can be achieved by ceasing to
think for oneself, and instead accepting the absolute authority of someone who
is ostensibly already enlightened. Rather than abdicating self-government, one
should indeed “be a light unto oneself.”
At the same time, Diotima’s model makes it clear how the individualism of
spiritual “ascent” doesn’t lead to bleak or sterile isolation. It doesn’t lead to what

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Nietzsche, for example, depicts with his story of “Zarathustra,” who is more at
home with animals than with his fellow human beings. For true ascent is always
seeking to give and receive aid toward (further or renewed) ascent: it’s always
seeking to reproduce “birth in beauty.”

Uniqueness of the beloved

Gregory Vlastos’s second objection to Diotima’s account of love, besides the fact
that it appears not to provide for loving a person for her own sake, is that it appears
not to provide for loving a person as a unique whole. Rather, it identifies features
of the person which one loves and suggests that one might love any number of
people who have those features.
The issue here is that we tend to feel that the person we love is somehow not
replaceable. Why do we feel this? Even if another person could have the same
qualities and the same love of the Good in general, our beloved plays a unique
role in our life because it was our encounter with him or her that opened up, for
us, the dimension of complete caring which our great love stories celebrate. (And
of which Diotima illuminates the essential aspect that a lover nurtures the other,
facilitating their “birth in beauty.”) The experience of discovering this dimension
is unique in one’s life, so that the person who first opened it up in one’s life likewise
seems unique. Even if another person in fact eventually occupies the same role
(when one rediscovers ascent and complete caring, as quite a few people seem to
do), it is such an intimate role that the flavor of “uniqueness” and irreplaceableness
persists.27 This is how a Platonic lover can come to feel that their partner is unique
and irreplaceable, so that Plato in the Phaedrus (256a-d) in fact assumes that the
best erotic relationships will involve lifelong fidelity.28
It’s worth noting, in this connection, that our first experience of complete
caring is likely to be from our mother. Not primarily as the one who physically
gave birth to us, but as the one who gave us soul birth, by nurturing soul qualities.
Though Diotima doesn’t explore parenting explicitly, her metaphors of pregnancy
and birth certainly invite such a comparison. She focuses on adolescence, rather
than early childhood, because it’s in adolescence that conscious reason begins to
emerge, which early childhood in general lacks. (Elsewhere, in the Republic and
Laws, Plato is very interested in the soul’s formation in early childhood.)
In any case, it’s a fact that the nurturing that lovers give each other reproduces
the pattern of “for the other’s sake” that is normally set, in one’s life, by one’s
parents and especially one’s mother. The felt irreplaceability of the mother/child
relationship then recurs in the form of the felt irreplaceability of the relationship
of lover and beloved. If the adolescent is “born” into adulthood, then that event
is literally unique for him. So a relationship that facilitated that birth is, in that
respect, likewise unique (though it may be a relationship that one had with a

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    179

number of people). And if, as seems to be the rule in modern romance, both lover
and beloved are “born” into new levels of maturity through their relationship,
again the relationship is unique, in that respect.
From infancy to old age, relationships of this kind figure, fortunately, in most
lives. Insofar as each such relationship figures at a unique moment in one’s personal
unfolding, the other party is a “unique whole,” valued for their contribution at this
unique moment in one’s life.
To explain the sense of one’s beloved’s uniqueness in this way is not to reduce
the beloved to what she contributes to one’s life, because that contribution depends
entirely, as I’ve explained, on one’s perceiving her as self-governed. It’s only by my
appreciating my beloved as self-governed, that she is able to inspire the increase of
self-government in me that Diotima calls “birth in beauty.” Only a “whole person,”
herself involved in a process of birth, can inspire such a process in another. The
uniqueness of this transaction, in both parties’ lives, makes each of them unique
for the other.
So again, the kind of relationship that Diotima discusses is not something that
only schoolmasters or self-proclaimed philosophers might experience. Rather, it’s
a kind of love that probably most humans experience.

All-inclusive love
But as my remarks are beginning to suggest, Diotima’s account applies not only
to “romance” as we usually understand it but also to a much wider range of
relationships. Vlastos is right to point out that Diotima herself says nothing about
romantic exclusiveness or fidelity. I think this is because Plato does indeed intend
to sketch a kind of love that can, in principle, be addressed to an unlimited number
of others. Not because (as Vlastos supposes) it doesn’t value these others for their
own sake or treat them as unique, but because it does value every one of them for
their own sake and treat them as unique.
Every individual comes into one’s life at a unique point in one’s personal
evolution or “birth” and thus in a unique way, and every individual is likewise an
opportunity (if the circumstances permit it) for one to contribute to some kind of
“birth” in them. Certainly Socrates is always on the lookout for such opportunities,
both in others and in himself.
So when Anders Nygren says that in contrast to eros, agape is “unselfish love,
it ‘seeketh not its own,’”29 we could point out that eros as Plato interprets it need
not be selfish either. It can promote, to the best of its ability, everyone’s “own,”
everyone’s self-government through pursuit of the Good, because these can all
reproduce “its own.”
Diotima doesn’t say explicitly what I just said, but her examples of the poets and
lawgivers give us an idea of the extent of the influence that an individual who seeks to

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be guided by the Good might exercise. To these we can add what Plato already knew
about Socrates’s influence on others, what we now know about Socrates’s influence
across millennia, and what we know of the influence of other spiritual teachers. In
the next chapter I’ll derive from the Timaeus a reason for thinking that Plato may
indeed think, and be justified in thinking, that we rationally should seek to exercise
effectively unlimited influence on behalf of “birth in beauty.” If, as I said above, lovers
break the bonds of finite human life on our behalf, so does Socrates when he makes
it his personal business to inspire us all to “examine our lives” and be born in beauty.
If I’m right about this, then love as “birth in beauty” covers the whole range of
human relationships, from the most intimate to the most inclusive. Together with
the Forms, “birth in beauty” is another of the germinal ideas in Plato whose power
to illuminate we are still discovering.30
I might add also something that’s probably obvious already, which is that what
Plato shows us in this account undermines gender stereotypes in a rather deep
way. What he says about participating in “birth” obviously doesn’t depend on
one’s possessing any particular physical equipment, and can apply to any gender
whatever. So if Plato shows us, as I think he does, that “giving birth” is something in
which everyone should and probably does want to engage, he shows us something
of considerable interest about human nature as such.

Plato’s reply to romantic

anti-intellectualism
Returning to our initial issue, I’ve tried to make clear how Plato shows that
interpersonal love and inspiration depend in an important way on reason or
intellect. Love wants the object of its love to flourish, to be “born in beauty.” But
flourishing and beauty involve the possession of appropriate kinds of excellence,
and thus they involve reason and intellect, which are necessarily invoked whenever
judgments of excellence are made. Rather than being sheer feeling, love is a feeling
that’s deeply informed by reason.
This is just as much the case in the love of gods or of God as it is in the love of
human beings. We can’t make sense of the idea of loving a god whom we take to
be characterized primarily by sheer “power.” It’s only insofar as a god has virtues,
excellences, that we can speak of loving him or her.
This is also why Plato’s notion that “philosophers” can become “like god” is not
ridiculous. It’s not ridiculous because to the extent that someone loves and thus
tries to possess wisdom and other excellences, he or she resembles the gods, whom
we love for possessing those excellences.
Of course, who the actual “philosophers” are who might do this is a wide open
question. As we learn from the Symposium, they must be at least as invested in
reproduction, in “birth in beauty,” as they are in thought (that is, birth in beauty).

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    181

 A “philosopher,” as Plato understands the term, is a person who loves wisdom.
Rather than being separate from the love of human beings, love of wisdom is an
essential aspect of it, because loving human beings is seeking the good for them,
and this requires clarity about what the good really is—that is, it requires wisdom.
The “intellectual” or wisdom aspects of love and of God have been badly
neglected both by philosophy and by theology since the nineteenth century. Like
Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, most of us tend to
assume that intellect is a dry, calculating, and constraining faculty, which has
no relevance to exalted experiences like love, ecstasy, mysticism, or religion. As
for “wisdom,” we have stopped talking about it just about entirely. In contrast to
knowledge, wisdom seems to be an obsolete concept. And we think of love and
ecstasy purely as feelings, rather than as oriented by any conception of value. The
result, as I’ve suggested, is that we have ceased to think of love and ecstasy as
experiences that we can understand and cultivate in an intelligent way.
By the same token we tend to think of “God” in terms of sheer power or
awesomeness, rather than in terms of excellence and freedom that we can to some
degree understand and emulate. So depending on our personal preference we either
affirm or deny the reality of that power or awesomeness and our “dependence” on
it. Whereas with the help of Plato’s account of love and excellence we could see
how the divine excellence and divine freedom are present in our experience, and
point beyond our experience to similar but higher levels which are not in principle
inaccessible to us.
Awe and fear are still appropriate responses to the God whom we can to some
degree understand and emulate, insofar as the freedom which this emulation
involves requires us to abandon all of our familiar conceptions of ourselves: the
“shadows” in the Cave. I mentioned in the previous chapter how Plato dramatizes
the resistance that our “fear of freedom” can inspire. But this resistance is not
the sole or primary way in which he describes us as responding to the ascent.
Our ultimate response is joy in discovering our true self, the final resolution of
our perennial “identity crisis.” “There if anywhere should a person live his life,
beholding that Beauty” (Symposium 211d).
Plato’s straightforward explanation of how love is more than a feeling,
how it requires and embodies intellect or wisdom, can help us to appreciate
once again how to cultivate love, ecstasy, and awareness of the divine in our
experience. For the divine as traditionally understood is precisely the unity of
love with the good on which reason focuses. So when we are once again aware
of this unity in our daily lives, we will have the opportunity to enhance this
awareness, to take it to higher levels. Whereas as long as love, on the one hand,
and reason’s focus on truth, on the other, remain in separate compartments
in our minds, this ascent won’t even get started. Our experience will continue
to be compartmentalized, conflicted (as in “head versus heart,” science versus
religion), and impoverished.31

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Beauty, too, must not be ghettoized
An additional aspect of life which has been distorted by life’s modern
compartmentalization is the aesthetic aspect. When John Keats writes that
“beauty is truth, truth beauty,” we might initially interpret this as a declaration
that art is the sole or the primary locus of truth—which is an ideology that leads
to “l’art pour l’art,” to conceptions of an individual life as ideally a purely aesthetic
project, and so forth. Taking Keats’s dictum in this way would make it another
instance of romantic anti-intellectualism, as in Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard,
and Nietzsche.
An alternative, more Platonic interpretation of Keats’s dictum would put it in
the context of the Symposium’s broader notion of “beauty” (to kalon) as including
virtue or excellence of all kinds. So that beauty would include intellectual and
moral as well as what we call aesthetic excellence. If we then remember the
Republic’s demonstration of the role that excellence as the rational pursuit of the
Good plays in accomplishing the unity of a person as such, we can understand
aesthetic beauty as one aspect of an inclusive truth or reality that’s also intellectual
and moral. All of which for Plato—and in actual fact, I imagine, for Keats as well—
can inspire the same passionate and intelligent love.
It will certainly still be the case that, as Plato says, “justice and self-control do
not shine out through their images down here. . . . Beauty alone has this privilege,
to be the most visible and the most loved” (Phaedrus 250b-d). That is, beauty is
the way in which excellence makes itself “visible” in the world of images, of finite
things and the senses, which is why we can more easily be inspired by it and come
up with ideologies like aestheticism which segregate visible and audible beauty
from other forms of excellence. But when we understand what it is that we’re being
inspired by, we will understand what unites the visible or audible and the invisible
and inaudible aspects of excellence.

A more inclusive kind of truth, which is

reason/love
When we see art and science in this way, art will neither be segregated from
science, in splendid isolation as a sui generis “aesthetics,” nor flatly be identified
with science. Instead, we’ll see both art and science as aspects of a more inclusive
kind of truth, which they address in different ways. The same will hold, as I’ve
described, for ethics and religion. Art, ethics, and religion, like science, are all ways
in which we seek, and seek to promote, rational (intelligent) freedom. This seeking
and seeking to promote are what we call love. And the more inclusive truth which
all of these efforts seek and seek to promote is, in fact, the same rational freedom by

PLATO ON REASON, LOVE, AND INSPIRATION    183

which they seek it. This is the transcending and reconciling reality that surpasses
all intra-cultural bickering.
In fact, of course, this unity of seeking and seeking to promote, of reason/
love, is present in the practical experience of just about everyone. We love self-
transcending nature, each other, justice, science, art, and God, and we have good
reasons for loving them and wanting to promote them.32 What we don’t have is a
vocabulary that reflects the unity of reason/love in this totality of Spirit. Instead,
we have the compartmentalized pseudo-scientific vocabulary that flatly separates
head from heart, “cognition” from “affect,” “fact” from “value,” and “science” from
“love,” “ethics,” “art,” “beauty,” and “religion,” and thus prevents us from describing
and consciously appreciating the reason/love that all of these share. Whereas if
we could describe and appreciate this reason/love, it seems likely that this would
help us to practice it with greater synergy, and less conflict and confusion, than we
currently experience.
We need an updated version of the “Philosophy of Spirit” portion of Hegel’s
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences—of the whole book, for that matter—
to help us to get this whole uniquely satisfying picture into focus. Following,
of course, Plato as well, whose analysis Hegel was elaborating. I hope that my
suggestions here will encourage additional people to join in this work.33

How far does philosophy’s love extend?

Understanding, as I hope we now do, how reason is an essential aspect of our love
of (among other things) people, we can see how philosophy as the cultivation of
reason and wisdom could help to cultivate the love of people as well. So that if
philosophy were in fact interested in love of people, the two would make excellent
partners.
In the spirit of compartmentalization, though, one might still wonder whether
“philosophy” needs to be interested in love of anything besides “wisdom.” Do Plato
and his followers just happen to have a special interest in interpersonal love, which
other “philosophers,” other cultivators of reason or wisdom, needn’t and in some
cases apparently don’t share? And how far does Platonic interpersonal love extend?
In the next chapter, I’ll try to show how Plato shows that reason as such needs
love that’s in principle unlimited. This will take us further, as well, into Plato’s
theology, his account of the divine.

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8 PLATO ON “BECOMING
LIKE GOD”

Ch’io giunsi l’aspetto mio col valore infinito.

(I joined my vision with the Infinite Goodness.)
DANTE, DIVINE COMEDY, PARADISO, XXXIII, 81

Why should “intellect” love human

beings at all?
In the last chapter we explored the way in which love requires reason or intellect.
Now we need to consider the converse question: How and whether reason or
intellect requires love. Why should “intellect” love human beings at all? Why
shouldn’t it simply contemplate the Forms, indifferent to the antics of mere
humans?
Diotima explains that mortal intellects, like ours, will want to be “immortal as
far as is possible for something mortal” (207a), by reproducing themselves through
others. This helps us to understand why we aren’t satisfied by being completely
self-contained—why we do love some others. But most of the Symposium invites
us to read this account as addressing romantic love. Seen in that way, it gives us
no reason to go beyond the love of one or a few others, whom we find particularly
promising as continuers of our personal pursuit of the Good. And it doesn’t show
that apart from mortality, reason or intellect as such has any need of love. Do we,
or does intellect as such, have any reason to love anyone beyond the small circle of
our romantic interests?
In regard to this question, Plato gives us one exceptionally pregnant thought.
It’s in his description in the Timaeus of the demiurge, the “craftsman” who brings
the world into existence.
 Why did he who framed this whole universe of becoming frame it? . . . He was
good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so,
being free of jealousy [or “spite”: phthonos], he wanted everything to become as
much like himself as was possible. (29e)

Note the “everything,” here. The demiurge seeks to extend his pursuit or
embodiment of the Good not just into a few individuals, and not just into gods or
humans, but (as far as possible) into everything.
If, as is clearly the case, the demiurge is divine, and if we remember Socrates’s
pronouncement in the Theaetetus that a philosopher will become “as much like
God as possible” (176b), then this description of the demiurge gives philosophers a
reason to try to promote the pursuit of the Good, or “birth in beauty,” in everything.
That’s what God, as the demiurge, does, and to be like God, we must do the same.1
Plato’s notion of “becoming like God” has recently come in for renewed examination
by scholars, and its relevance to ethics has begun to be considered.2 There are two
major questions that need to be resolved here. First, why (in fact) should a human
being want to become “as much like God as possible”? And second, why should we
think that God as the demiurge “can never become jealous of anything,” and therefore
would “want everything to become as much like himself as was possible”?

Why become like God?

Socrates’s stated reason in the Theaetetus for saying that we should “become
like God” is that “evil” must “inevitably prowl about this earth,” and we should
therefore “make all haste to escape from earth to heaven” (176a-b). Since we can
safely assume that he isn’t advocating suicide, he must have something else in
mind. We find out what this is when he goes on to say that the way to become “like
God” is to become “just and pure, with understanding” (176b).
He has explained in the Republic that being “just” involves, at least, having one’s
rational part in charge of one’s soul. So we can assume that one becomes like God
by cultivating the soul harmony in which the rational part is in charge.
There is no emphasis, in the Theaetetus passage, on how becoming “just” affects
our dealings with other people. On the contrary, much like the Phaedo’s notorious
passage on escaping from imprisonment in the body, the Theaetetus emphasizes
“escape from earth to heaven.” So if we view this passage in the same way that
we viewed the Phaedo passage earlier, its central message is not that we need to
escape from evil, as such, but rather that we need to put our rational part in charge,
because (as Republic iv tells us) we’ll thereby be more fully ourselves.
What does being fully ourselves have to do with being “like God”? It’s precisely
God, Plato implies, who is fully “himself,” by virtue of not being distracted by
mortal or bodily concerns. So that to become like God is to become one’s true self.

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 The Timaeus explains this in a second key passage:

Now we ought to think of the most sovereign part of our soul as god’s gift to
us, given to be our guiding spirit. . . . So if a man has become absorbed in his
appetites or his ambitions and takes great pains to further them, all his thoughts
are bound to become merely mortal. And so far as it is at all possible for a man
to become thoroughly mortal, he cannot help but fully succeed in this, seeing
that he has cultivated his mortality all along. On the other hand, if a man has
seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has
exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that
his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his
grasp. And to the extent that human nature can partake of immortality, he can
in no way fail to achieve this: constantly caring for his divine part as he does,
keeping well-ordered the guiding spirit that lives within him, he must indeed
be supremely happy. (90a-c)

That this is the activity of the “most sovereign [kuriotaton, most ruling] part of
our soul” is a reminder that the “divine part,” here, is the “reasoning part” that we
learned about in Republic iv. When we rule ourselves and thus are fully ourselves,
and find truth, our thoughts are “immortal and divine,” and, so far as possible, so
are we. To be fully oneself by ruling oneself is to be “like god.”
It’s important to notice how Plato’s conception of “god,” here, differs from
conventional conceptions of God as supremely “powerful.” As in Plato’s successors
like Hegel, God for Plato has the “power” not to move mountains and the like but
to be completely himself, and thus (as I like to put it, following Hegel) to be fully
real, as himself. And Plato here is saying that we have this same power, at least
to some extent, and by exercising it we become as far as possible “immortal and
divine.”
So the philosopher seeks to become “like God” because God is fully real, as
himself. But as we noted, the Theaetetus’s description of becoming like God says
nothing about how someone who becomes like God will treat other people. It’s
the Timaeus that appears to tell us how God, and thus presumably also those who
become “like God,” will relate to others.
So this brings us to our second question.

Why can’t God be “jealous”?

“One who is good can never become jealous of anything,” so the demiurge made
everything as much like himself as possible. Why can one who is good never
become jealous of anything?

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    187

 To answer this question, we can’t simply assume that every god, as such, must
be benevolent. Zeus was (traditionally) a guarantor of justice, but no one assumed
that every god must play this role. A later Greek philosopher, Epicurus, described
gods who took no interest whatever in what went on in the world. No one thought
that his view could be dismissed simply on the grounds that obviously gods are
benevolent. Zeus himself is described in a famous story as punishing the Titan,
Prometheus, for giving fire to humans. (Much as the Book of Job, in the Hebrew
Scriptures, presents a God who is far from being generous.) And to suppose, as
Plato does, that a god must be (in some sense) “good” doesn’t automatically entail
that a god must provide benefits to mortals.3
In fact, common attitudes in ancient Greece endorsed human “jealousy,” in the
form of rivalry and caring for personal honors, as entirely natural and appropriate.
This is why Achilles’s “wrath,” when he was denied his share of the spoils of war, in
the Iliad, was a sympathetic theme for Homer’s audience. Of course Greek social
norms changed over the centuries down to Plato’s time, but Achilles was always
admired as a prototypical hero.
So Plato needs to provide an argument for Timaeus’s principle that one who
is good can’t be “jealous.” But all he provides here is a flat assertion that this is
the case. We find similar negative comments about “jealousy” (phthonos) in
other dialogues, including the Protagoras, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, and
Laws. But none of these passages gives an explicit argument for this rather novel
evaluative position that Plato is taking. Nor have I seen an argument presented on
Plato’s behalf.4

God as the One

I think we can find an argument for Plato’s position on phthonos if we put the
issue in the broadest context of what Plato was up to. In particular, we need to
look at the way in which Plato associates Goodness with the “One.” We’ve seen
the central importance of his account in Republic books iv-vi of how a person
“becomes entirely one” (443e), and how doing this involves a pursuit of the Good.
We’ll need to take account also of Plato’s discussions of the One in his Philebus
and Parmenides and of the reports of his oral teaching, in which he apparently
associated the Good with the One.5
In the Philebus, Socrates describes the One as an independent principle,
alongside the Many (16d). So the One is not, as we might suppose, just one
number among others. Plato doesn’t spell out, here, why the One should be
special in this way.
The entire second part of the Parmenides is devoted to examining the “one”
and the “others.” Plato presents Parmenides, a famous Greek philosopher of the
generation preceding Socrates’s, who lived in Elea, a Greek city in Italy. Parmenides

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visits Athens and leads young Socrates through a series of arguments purporting
to demonstrate all sorts of outlandish things: that the One “and the others both
are and are not, and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both
in relation to themselves and in relation to each other” (166c). We can assume
that a concept that invites the detailed, even excruciating attention that Plato gives
to it here, has central importance for him even if he doesn’t always make that
importance explicit elsewhere.6
It’s important to notice something that Plato doesn’t mention in the Parmenides,
perhaps because he assumes that everyone will know it, which is that the “One”
played a central role in Parmenides’s own masterwork, his philosophical poem
about “being.” There, Parmenides maintained not only that “that which can be
spoken and thought must needs be” (Fragment 6, Diels), so that we can’t speak
or think about what is not. He also maintained that what is, “was not in the past,
nor shall it be, since it is now, all at once, one, continuous” (Fragment 8, emphasis
added). That is, Parmenides was concerned not just to deny nonbeing but to insist
on the unity of being.
Parmenides was the last of the great Greek thinkers of the century and a
half preceding Socrates who sought a single unifying principle of everything.
Thales with water, Anaximander with the “boundless,” Anaximenes with air, and
Heraclitus with his fire or logos are often described as “proto-scientific” by virtue
of their desire to produce a unified “theory of everything.” In each case, a kind of
unity was the key desired outcome.
Parmenides followed suit in perhaps the most radical way possible, by nominating
being itself as the unifying principle. However, Parmenides’s proposal was so radical
that its implications seem very difficult to accept. Since change apparently involves
a transition from something’s not being X to its being X (or vice versa), Parmenides’s
prohibition on speaking of what is not makes it hard to see how we can speak of
anything as changing. As Parmenides says, there “is” no past or future in being
as he understands it. And without a past, future, or change, it’s hard to see how
Parmenides’s theory applies to the world that we seem to experience.
Many thinkers who succeeded Parmenides were very impressed by his
conclusions. Democritus, the atomist, preserved something like Parmenides’s
unitary “being” in the form of his uncuttable “atoms.” Other teachers turned
increasingly away from grand theories of the cosmos, toward human affairs. If
grand theory as in Parmenides was inapplicable to human experience, humans
would have to go it alone. Protagoras taught that “man is the measure” of truth,
and Gorgias taught that there was no truth at all. Socrates himself made a similar
turning to “human affairs.” While insisting that we should seek true virtue (arete,
excellence), he gave no clear account of what truth would be. There are many
parallels between this period in Greek thought and the more or less “humanistic”
relativism that has become widespread in our own last couple of centuries, as
theology and “metaphysics” have fallen into disrepute.

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    189

 Plato was alarmed by these developments, seeing how arbitrary life could and
did become when people followed the lead of figures like Protagoras, Gorgias, and
(in the Republic) Thrasymachus. If the “measure” was merely “man,” men could
do anything they felt like doing. Plato embraced Socrates’s doctrine of virtue as a
necessary antidote to these views. And he set out to give it a foundation that would
render it more than a slogan.
That foundation was, of course, the “Forms”—but not only the Forms. For
as a plurality, the Forms lacked order and unity. They lacked “oneness.” As Plato
has Socrates explain in Republic book iv, the soul needs to become “entirely one”
(443a). So the ascent of the soul’s rational part, which Plato has Socrates describe
in the Sun, Line, and Cave allegories in books vi and vii, leads to a single unifying
goal, the “sun” or the Form of the Good. It’s not surprising, then, that in his
lecture on the Good, Plato apparently identified the Good with the One. He was
identifying Socrates’s pole star, the Good or Virtue, with Parmenides’s pole star,
being or the One.
But this combination of two apparently sharply contrasting views implied
that both sides needed to be corrected. Socrates needed to be corrected by being
given an “ontology,” a doctrine of being and truth. And Parmenides needed to
be corrected by being given an account of how being or the One can play a
role in our apparently changing world. So in Republic book v, Plato’s Socrates
introduces a possible “intermediate” realm between “what is completely [and]
is completely knowable” (namely, the Forms, or Parmenidean being) and “what
is in no way [and] is in every way unknowable.” This intermediate is what “is
such as to be and also not to be” (477a), what “participates in both being and not
being” (478d).
This, of course, is Plato’s notion of “degrees of being,” which we discussed in
Chapter 5. The world of change, time, and human affairs has a degree of being—we
can in fact usefully talk about it, though not “know” it—inasmuch as it “participates
in” the eternal Forms, Goodness, being, and unity. Parmenides was right to insist
that only the unchanging has full being, being as itself, but he was wrong to suggest
that it is useless or impossible to talk about anything that has less than full being.
Plato’s whole account of the “soul,” in Republic iv, is an account of something that
seeks to be “entirely one” and thus to “be” in the full sense, to be as itself, but which
often falls short of that goal. This seeking-to-be is the key thing that Parmenides
had failed to get into focus, and to which Plato, by drawing on Socrates’s teaching
about “virtue,” is directing our attention.
In this way, Plato shows us how “oneness” as being is our own constant pole
star. We seek to be fully ourselves, to be as ourselves and not merely as the tools of
our appetites and emotions. And we identify the divine as what is able consistently
to be as itself, to be “one” and not many, rather than having to continually seek this,
as we do.

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“Jealousy” and the “One”
So what does all of this tell us about God’s relation to phthonos, or “jealousy”?
If I’m right in thinking that the person who “becomes entirely one,” in Republic
iv, does so in order to be self-governing rather than being governed by appetites
and emotions that just happen to him, then the fullest unity is a function of self-
government. Jealousy and spite, on the other hand, are clearly ways in which we’re
governed by our relations to others. So they are ways in which we’re not “one,” not
self-governed, but instead we’re multiple, governed by a multiplicity of beings. So
for a being that aims, as Plato suggests we do, to be “one,” self-governed, and thus
fully itself, jealousy and spite are not the way to go.
So something that’s entirely One can’t be “jealous” of others, opposed to them
(even by being “indifferent to” them) and thus governed by its relation to them.
So if the demiurge is to be good and thereby One, he can’t be “jealous.” And this
is why Plato tells us that the demiurge set out to make everything “as much like
himself as possible”—to share his goodness as widely as possible. This is why, as the
Greek/Roman Platonist Plotinus put it some centuries later, the One “overflows.”7
This seems to be the reason why the demiurge as “intellect” is not indifferent
to mere creatures like ourselves, but seeks to encourage us—all of us—to pursue
the Good. In this way the demiurge is less “contained,” less restricted by us than
it would be if its relation to us were characterized by indifference or “jealousy.” To
the extent that the demiurge helps us to resemble it, we are like extensions of it,
rather than separate containers around it, which would make it “many” (rather
than one) by our relationships to it.8
As you’ll notice, this is very much the idea of inner “freedom” that Hegel
promoted. To the extent that a being excludes others from its sphere of concern,
it is determined by this relationship (of exclusion) and it isn’t self-determining or,
in that sense, free. So the possessor of inner freedom doesn’t exclude others from
her sphere of concern.
This is Plato’s and Hegel’s answer to the traditional Greek theology of divine
“jealousy,” and likewise their answer to the capricious “God” of many stories in the
Hebrew Scriptures and other religious traditions. It’s not that God happens to be
“love,” but rather that God must be love in order to be fully free.
This seems to be what Plato is thinking about the demiurge, and therefore
probably about “intellect” as such, in us as well as in gods. Insofar as we seek to be
“one” by being guided (like the demiurge) by the Good, we too will avoid “jealousy”
by taking a positive interest in everyone around us, lovingly promoting their self-
government in the way that the Timaeus and Diotima in the Symposium both
describe. This argument connecting the demiurge, the One, and humans’ “becoming
like God” shows us why “intellect” or reason as such will un-jealously “go down” as
love of what we call “others,” rather than merely contemplating the Forms.

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    191

Non-“jealousy” and the virtues
The next step is to explain how humans who love everything and promote
everything’s self-government, as the demiurge does, will develop the ordinary
virtues.9 I would suggest that humans who imitate the demiurge’s desiring things
to be as good as possible will provide what aid they can to others to become good,
and this will constitute a large part of what we commonly call justice. For others
can presumably best become good, or function well, when their efforts to interact
productively with the world around them are respected and supported by those
around them; and such respect and support are a large part of what we call justice.
As for dealings with one’s own body, I take it that a human who tries to be
like the demiurge will encourage her body to be as good (by contributing to self-
government as pursuit of the Good) as possible, just as she encourages other
people to do so. And this will be the basis of such virtues in her as courage and
temperance. Courage and temperance both reflect a collaboration between one’s
rational part and one’s body in which the rational part’s broader conception of
the Good makes appropriate allowance for the body’s preservation and pleasure,
without allowing them to dominate one’s deliberations.10
As John M. Armstrong writes, Plato’s idea in the Laws “is not that temperance
and justice make us like god because god is temperate and just.” (God can’t be
temperate and just, because God doesn’t have to deal with a body, with its needs
and appetites.) “Rather, we become like God by becoming measured. For souls
such as ours, becoming temperate and just constitutes the appropriate measure.”11
In this way it seems that “becoming like God” can be an effective ethical
standard. Plato sketched it out more fully in his later works (Philebus, Timaeus,
and Laws) and grounded it effectively on his argument for ascent in the Republic
together with his systematic critique of “jealousy” in the Republic, Philebus, and
Timaeus and his reported lecture on the Good. These show us how an “ascending”
intellect needs to be loving toward all, in the way that the Timaeus’s demiurge is.

Divine “going down” in Symposium and

Republic
I don’t know whether Plato had in mind something like the Timaeus’s notion of
divine “going down” when he wrote the Symposium. But it seems to illuminate
the questions that we raised about the final portion of Diotima’s speech, where
the person who has seen Beauty is described as being able to give birth to true
virtue, and thus to be immortalized. Why would he consider giving birth, rather
than merely contemplating Beauty? Perhaps because he wants to be fully real and
consequently self-governing and not “multiple” (again putting together Republic

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443a and Timaeus), and therefore to “go down” in the manner of the demiurge and
make things as good as possible. He doesn’t aim to immortalize his mere particular
self; rather, he aims to contribute, as the demiurge does, to the best possible world.
But in this way he does in fact immortalize what’s both best in himself and most
fully himself. As we all can, to the extent that we approach knowledge of the
Beautiful (or Good).
I suspect that this is also Plato’s ultimate solution to the much-discussed
problem in the Republic of why the Guardians, having seen the Good, would be
willing to return to the Cave to share their knowledge with those who remained
behind. Socrates’s interlocutor asks, “Are we to do [the trainees] an injustice by
making them live a worse life when they could live a better one?” Socrates’s reply is
that we’ll tell them, “We’ve made you kings in our city . . . both for yourselves and
for the rest of the city. You’re better and more completely educated than the others.
. . . Therefore each of you in turn must go down to live in the common dwelling
place of the others and grow accustomed to seeing in the dark” (519d-520c). He
makes a virtue of this, as he calls it, “compulsory” character of the going down,
since it ensures that people won’t be doing government service for glory or for
money (521a).
These comments seem rather external. They have the unfortunate implication
that people who, having seen the Good, are supposed to fully understand justice,
will nevertheless receive the “just order” to go down as an unwelcome imposition
(“something compulsory”). The demiurge in the Timaeus has a better attitude. He
helps others to become good because he isn’t “jealous” or spiteful—because, as
I’ve suggested, he knows that dividing himself off from others would prevent him
from being fully “one,” fully self-governing (and divine). Philosophers who seek to
“become like God” will apply the same thought to themselves.
As with the “noble lie,” here again the Republic’s doctrine is rather external and
controlling, while the Symposium and Timaeus, with their “birth in beauty” and
their non-“jealousy,” give us a more penetrating way of understanding the issue.

Philosophy’s heart
The upshot of all of this is that the second half of Plato’s double thesis seems to be
confirmed: reason (in the form of rational self-government) requires and carries
with it love of others, just as love requires and carries with it reason. As usual, we’re
talking here of ideal reason and ideal love, of which less fully developed versions of
reason and love will, of course, fall short.12
This is also Plato’s ultimate answer to the challenge that he posed for himself
in the Republic, to show that a fully rational person has good reason to act justly
toward others. The only way to be fully “one” is to love everything, and thus love
everyone, as the demiurge does.13

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    193

 To our world, in which we think of reason as by its nature cold and unfeeling
and love as by its nature warm and unthinking, Plato’s dual thesis that reason and
love each require and involve the other must seem quite paradoxical. But I submit
that we should take it very seriously, as Hegel, Emerson, Whitehead, and many
modern poets, lovers, and scientists in practice do.
For if we can find the sweet and dynamic identity of love and intellect in
everything that we do, we’ll be less divided against ourselves and more at home
in our world. We’ll no longer be distracted by our current debilitating contrast
between religious “love” and philosophical “reason.” We’ll rediscover both the
heart’s philosophy and philosophy’s heart. And it will become evident that the
Christian doctrine of love of one’s neighbor and one’s enemy is not the result of a
randomly issued “commandment” or of a rationally optional “idealism” but rather
a universal requirement of full individuality or self-government.
Is all of this just a wish-fulfilling fantasy of “sweetness and light”? It seems clear
that the “masters of suspicion” including Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud,
have all tried to give us access not just to truths but to truths that they hoped
could make us more free, more in charge of our lives. In that way, they were all
contributing to the “ascent” that Plato and his followers pursue, so we should
welcome their contributions warmly (which of course need not mean uncritically).
What’s more, in their rejection of dualisms and their preference for thinking of
reality as one unified substance (which they usually refer to as “matter” or “nature”),
Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud have an important point. Reality must indeed
be unified, since otherwise it would have unexplained internal relationships,
between its two or more “realms” or other ingredients, and we would have failed
to find what is real as itself, and thus ultimately real. The materialists’ or naturalists’
mistake is not that they think of reality as unified but that they fail to see the role
that’s played, in reality’s unification, by the vertical dimension of individuation
through rational ascent or love. Rather than being given as a substance, reality is
achieved through individuation. (So that as Hegel puts it, in a reality that’s real as
itself, “substance” must give way to “subject.”)
The naturalist tradition throws out the baby of individuation, reason, and love
along with the dualist bathwater. This baby, as we have now seen, is the key to
Plato’s account of a God who must love, as well as of humans who must emulate
this God. These “two” realities are evidently one, while still being distinguished
from each other on a vertical dimension of increasing success in individuation.

Is the Demiurge “immanent” or

“transcendent”?
Returning to the Timaeus: the “demiurge” story is one of Plato’s important passages
relating to what we call “God.” None of these passages is clearly intended to give

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a definitive account of what God is. The demiurge story is pivotal in the Timaeus,
but it’s brief and gives no specifics as to what the demiurge was or where he came
from. Scholarly discussion of the passage has focused mainly on the question
whether it should be taken at face value, as an account of the actions of a being
at some point in the past, through which the physical world came into being. Or
should it be taken figuratively as an account of a nontemporal, eternal relationship
whereby the divine constantly produces and supports the world. The latter view
has been attractive for interpreters who want the Timaeus to be consistent with the
doctrine that Socrates laid down at Phaedrus 245e that souls exist eternally.
My discussion of what the passage implies regarding the functioning of a
perfectly free intellect certainly hasn’t taken it as an account of the contingent
preferences and actions of one particular being, as the account of God’s creative
work in the book of Genesis often seems to be taken. But neither have I treated the
demiurge as merely immanent in the physical world. If he is to be a model of unity
(individuation) and self-government, he had better go beyond the lack of unity
and lack of self-government that characterize much of the world. And this going
beyond the world to greater self-government will make him more fully real, more
real as himself, than the world.
In his Plato on God as Nous, Stephen Menn argues that rather than being
“immanent” in souls and thus in the world, the demiurge, as nous (“intellect”),
is “a single being . . . existing apart from the bodies and souls he creates.”14 Menn
convincingly demonstrates that the demiurge can’t simply exist “in” souls and the
world, as though these were real independently of its being “in” them. But Menn’s
way of expressing this important fact, by describing nous as “a single being . . .
existing apart from. . . ,” suggests a “two-world” model, in which the world is one
“being” (or collection of beings), and nous is another. Fortunately Menn goes on
to say in proper Platonic fashion that “the nous that God is is just the nous that . . .
souls have when they act according to reason” (p. 18). That is, the nous (intellect)
is a “virtue” (p. 17) in which things in the world (such as souls) participate, as they
participate in Forms. So we needn’t suppose that tables and chairs and souls are
“beings” in the same way that nous is a “being.” Tables and chairs and souls get
their being from their participation in Forms and nous. They don’t exist separately,
in the sense of not depending on Forms and nous for their being.
Nor, on the other hand, do Forms and nous exist separately from tables and
chairs and souls. For nous “wants” everything, the world, to be as good as it can be;
and it “wants” this precisely so as to be Good and One, itself. To be itself, it must
do everything it can to promote goodness and oneness in the world. And thus it is
not and cannot be itself without dealing with the world in this way.
So any talk of God’s “existing apart from” the world, in Plato, must immediately
be qualified by a reminder that what’s supposedly “separate” is also intimately
linked, in both directions. The divine is linked with the world by the divine’s
“wanting” and indeed needing to create the world, so as itself to be fully “One” and

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    195

self-governing. (So as itself to be, as Hegel puts it, “truly infinite,” not defined and
thus governed by its difference from or exclusion of something other than it.) And
the world is linked with the divine by the divine’s giving the world whatever unity
and thus full reality the world possesses.
This intimate linkage between the divine and the world is the fundamental
principle by which Platonism distinguishes itself from the common notion of
God as primarily a “separate being,” and only secondarily “good,” and so forth.
By making Goodness primary, as what gives God the self-government and thus
the kind of “separateness” that God does have, Platonism makes it clear how this
“separateness” is not that of one simply “real” object alongside another simply
“real” object. The world’s reality depends forever on God’s reality as what’s fully
Good and self-governing, and God’s reality as fully Good and self-governing
depends forever upon God’s creating the world.15
In this way, the Platonic tradition avoids the dual alternatives of atheism
and not-truly-infinite “God as a separate being” theism, the evil twins that dog
so many of our discussions about “God.” It avoids the incoherent conception of
“transcendence” as separate existence.

Rather than “creationism,” the central

issue is value, purpose, and rational
self-government
The primary division in ancient Greek cosmology is not between those who think
the world had a beginning in time and those who think it did not. Rather, the
primary division is between those who think of the world as ordered teleologically,
toward goodness or benefit, and those who think of it as the product of chance.
Plato the “creationist” and Aristotle the non-“creationist” both belong to the
group who see the world as ordered toward goodness or benefit, while Leucippus,
Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius are the leading ancient advocates of
explaining the world in terms of chance.16
The role of this orientation toward goodness in making individual organisms
truly “one,” as in Republic iv (443e) and throughout Aristotle, is insufficiently
appreciated in current discussions. This role explains why, as Plato suggests and
Aristotle elaborates, all living things seek to emulate the divine.17 We do so not
because the divine is immortal and we don’t want to die but because only the divine
is fully itself, self-contained, “one” (and therefore immortal). We aren’t seeking
an immortality that from the usual modern point of view would seem entirely
beyond our reach. Rather, we’re seeking something that seems both desirable and
quite possibly within our reach, namely, to be fully ourselves, by seeking what’s
truly good.

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 The Plato/Aristotle view that reality is oriented toward goodness can be plausible
regardless of whether the physical sciences recognize this orientation. The sciences
as we now practice them are deeply invested in the pursuit of “efficient” rather than
“final” causes—of explanations in terms of “what started it” rather than in terms
of “that for the sake of which it happened.” They seek maximum predictive power,
rather than to articulate our experience as a whole. So they can’t realistically be
expected to appreciate, in their normal activities, the way in which goodness
functions in (full) reality. They can appreciate this only through a reflective self-
awareness that goes beyond their normal activities and corresponds to what we
traditionally call “metaphysics.”
What this reflective self-awareness reveals is that our goal in scientific inquiry,
as in other human activities, is to be rationally self-governing. Insofar as we’re
guided by an understanding of the real world, we’re more rationally self-governing
than if we’re guided by our initial, untested ideas about the world. Because the
sciences themselves aim to embody and facilitate rational self-government, the
sciences’ pervasive preoccupation with efficient causes for what they study cannot
be cited as grounds for dismissing the reality of rational self-government.
The pursuit of what’s truly real, through science, is evidence of our capacity to
pursue something that may or may not be programmed into us by our genetic heritage
or our environment. The pursuit of what’s truly good is another instance of the same
thing. There is no more reason to doubt the reality of the second than of the first. They
both serve to make us ourselves, rather than mere puppets of what’s other than us.
But to understand ourselves as seeking, in these ways, to be truly ourselves is to
understand ourselves not in terms of efficient causes (what started the process) but
in terms of a final cause (that for the sake of which the process happens)—the final
cause in this case being our own rational self-government. And if it’s reasonable
for us to understand ourselves in this way—as scientists who examine their own
activity as scientists surely must—then it must be reasonable to consider whether
other phenomena in nature might be understood in similar ways. For example,
it would be reasonable to consider whether plants and nonrational animals don’t
seek to be more self-governing than rocks, and thus to pursue more effectively
oneness and what may be good for them. And similarly, it would be reasonable
to consider whether all living things don’t, in these ways, seek oneness and the
“good,” which rational living things have the additional feature of being able to
clarify through thought, and thus to pursue more deeply.
From the point of view of our experience of seeking oneness and the good in
sophisticated ways, through science and other means, we can see nature as a whole
as engaged in less sophisticated versions of the same search. If we acknowledge
the reality of teleology in ourselves, what reason could we have for refusing to
consider its possible presence, in various forms, in the rest of nature? (Setting
aside, of course, the practical usefulness of efficient causes as means of controlling
what’s other than us.)

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    197

 I’m not proposing that we should think of the world projectively as composed of
“people,” “agents,” or “consciousnesses” like ourselves. Rather, that we should consider
ways in which things in the world approximate to the kind of rational self-government
that we sometimes achieve. Plants approximate to it in that they preserve and
reproduce a distinctive form. This is a simple kind of self-government. Nonrational
animals approximate to it in that they make decisions about how to interact with
their environments. This is clearly a more sophisticated kind of self-government. It’s
likely that in each of these cases, the organism’s inner experience of what it does has
important similarities to (as well as differences from) our own inner experience. But
in every case there is an orientation and effort toward what the organism (as we could
say by a kind of analogy) “conceives of ” as good; and thus there is teleology.
Thus, understanding nature teleologically need not be a regression to pre-
scientific animism or vitalism. It can instead be an elaboration of what’s implied
by the practice of science itself, insofar as that practice is an aspect of the pursuit
of rational self-government.
So there is no need to regard Plato’s and Aristotle’s teleological cosmology as
a quaint instance of premodern thinking. Instead, we can see it as an important
way—possibly needing some restatement, but not unacceptable in principle—of
articulating the consequences of the reality of rational self-government. Which is
one of our own most central and undeniable features.
And thus, by the same token, while we might want to revise the conceptions
of the divine that accompany Plato’s and Aristotle’s teleological cosmology, there
is no reason to regard these conceptions as unacceptable in principle. For these
conceptions are based, like the cosmology that goes with them, on an appreciation
of the significance of rational self-government, for which Plato and Aristotle make
a very good case.18

Since full reality is produced by cognition

of value, cognition is not an add-on
We can now also see why with regard to the possibility of knowledge, Platonism
doesn’t encounter the issues in which non-teleological modern philosophy tends
to become embroiled. If the fullest reality is achieved through knowledge of the
Good, a certain kind of knowledge is already part of reality itself, and doesn’t need
to be added on to it. We know from our most familiar experience (“from inside,”
as I say) that some realities, which we sometimes achieve, are more fully real than
others; and that we achieve these more real realities through knowledge. We can
still ask, at any given moment, whether we are currently achieving that kind of
reality and participating in the associated knowledge, but there is no question
about their being possible.19

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God and change
Alongside the Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Timaeus, the other major text
in which Plato addresses the divine is book x of his Laws, the lengthy dialogue on
which he is said to have been working at the time of his death. Here he presents
something like what has come to be called the “cosmological proof ” of God.
Distinguishing various ways in which motion can be brought about, the Athenian
who is the main speaker suggests that motion that “moves both itself and other
things” is “the most powerful and radically effective.” He describes this kind of
motion as equivalent to “life,” which in turn is equivalent to “soul.” So “soul,”
he says, “is the master, and matter its natural subject”; and soul is “a divinity”
(894c–897b).
The Athenian’s interlocutors find this argument convincing, but it’s not difficult
to identify the point at which many readers may not be convinced by it. This is
where the Athenian attempts to establish that there must indeed be, in reality, a
motion that “moves both itself and other things”: a self-mover. His comment on
this is,

How could anything whose motion is transmitted to it from something else

be the first thing to effect an alteration? It’s impossible. In reality . . . the entire
sequence of their movements must surely spring from some initial principle,
which can hardly be anything except the change effected by self-generated
motion. (894e-895a)

And this self-generated motion is the “divine” whose reality he aims to establish.
The natural response to this sort of argument is, of course, to ask why there
must be a “first thing” at all. Why must we assume that the sequence of motions
that makes up the world ever had a beginning?
The Athenian provides no answer to this question. One has to say that the
whole discussion, for this reason, is unsatisfying. Some explanation of the fact
that Plato didn’t try to make it more satisfying may be found in the fact that the
purpose of the Athenian’s discussion of the gods is explicitly to “persuade” (885e)
the ordinary citizens of the city that he’s describing, that the gods exist. That is, he
aims to be persuasive rather than to present a proof.

God and “reality as oneself”

I think it’s clear that Plato places far more weight, over all, on his account of
transcendence in the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, and Timaeus, than he
places on the cosmological argument of the Laws. He develops his account of
transcendence in much more detail, and it constitutes the appropriate background

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    199

for his Timaeus story of the demiurge. The demiurge “was good” and sought to
make the world “as much like himself as was possible.” That is, the demiurge had
the orientation to goodness and unity that Plato had analyzed in, especially, the
Republic. This orientation makes it appropriate to describe the demiurge both as
transcending the ordinary world by lacking worldly motivations of appetite and
selfishness and as being more fully real than it, in the sense that he is more self-
governing and thus more real as himself.
It’s appropriate for Plato to place more weight on his account of transcendence
in the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, and Timaeus, because this is an account of
what gives “God” authority for us, as opposed to the sheer power that one could
see in the “first cause” as presented in the Laws. What’s guided by the Good, and
thus is fully one and maximally real, is an appropriate object of worship, in a way
that a mere “cause” is not.
One could also suggest that the argument for divinity which Plato presents in
the Republic provides resources with which the cosmological argument of the Laws
could be restated and made much stronger. We could reformulate the Athenian’s
search for a “first thing to effect an alteration,” as (instead) a search for something
that’s fully real, as itself.
The “first thing” was meant to explain all of the motions that succeeded it,
and we wanted to know why there couldn’t be an endless series of explanations,
perhaps unknowable to us, but nevertheless each of them explaining the motion
that followed it. The Republic suggests that a more important goal than a beginning
point in time is what we might call a beginning point in reality—something that’s
fully real as itself, rather than deriving some of its character from its relationships
to what’s other than it.
It seems much more difficult to dismiss the Republic’s search for something
that’s fully real as itself than to dismiss the Athenian’s search for a beginning point
in time. The Republic’s search points to all of our most familiar forms of inquiry.
What should I really believe? How should I really live? If we ask these questions,
we are involved in the “transcending” process on which the Republic focuses. We
are seeking a kind of “reality” that isn’t present in whatever just happens to come
into our heads. And we’re seeking, like the demiurge, to be that kind of reality: to
be more self-determining than we would be if we just believed, and did, whatever
came into our heads. Furthermore, by seeking to find and to be that kind of reality,
we actually are it, to some extent, and we know from this first-hand experience
that rather than being an idle speculation, the notion of such a reality represents
something real. This is how, as Hegel puts it, “substance is essentially subject”
(Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, §25): we turn out to be, in an important respect,
the ultimate reality that we are searching for. Plato’s argument in Republic iv-vii
fully anticipates this shocking Hegelian conclusion.
Of course it’s surprising to hear that our everyday experience of asking ourselves
what we should really believe and what we should really do gives us access to the

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divine ultimate reality. But once one understands Plato’s point, it’s hard to dismiss
it. For the outcome of asking what we should really believe and what we should
really do is precisely something that’s more self-governed, more (in that sense)
transcendent, more real as itself, and more loving than what doesn’t ask these
questions. And what’s more self-governed, more transcendent, more real as itself,
and more loving has many of the attributes that we traditionally assign to God.20
Thus I hope I’ve made it clear how Plato’s conception of the divine meets
our needs. First, what is more self-governed, more transcendent, more real as
itself, and more loving than anything else, deserves to be worshipped in a way
that nothing else does. The presence of this divinity is the presence of love. And
secondly, this divinity is something with which we are intimately familiar, through
our own contributions to it. It’s not a separate being from us, though it’s certainly
higher than much of what we are up to.
And thus once again, Plato combines metaphysics and epistemology, the
doctrine of reality and the doctrine of knowledge, rather than separating them
in the manner of skepticism and much modern philosophy. If the fullest reality is
achieved through knowledge of the Good, a certain kind of knowledge is already
part of reality itself, and doesn’t need to be added on to it. Subject’s access to
substance is not a problem, because “substance is essentially subject.” This is not
because there is nothing but “subject,” but because subject is more fully substance,
more fully “itself,” than anything else is. Or, as I’ve been putting it, since our
primary experience is the identity crisis in which we fluctuate between having less
reality as ourselves and having more, and having more reality as ourselves is an
essential aspect of this fluctuation, we have direct knowledge of the higher reality
that has more reality as itself.

“Mystical experience” in Plato

Finally I want to say a little more about the nature of Plato’s “mysticism,” the topic
that I have been trying to reopen in these chapters. “Mysticism,” as I’ve explained,
is not about mystery or secrecy as such, but rather about direct knowledge of
the divine. Such knowledge seems sufficiently mysterious from the point of
view of the common ancient Greek conception of the divine as superhuman
anthropomorphic beings, or from the point of view of the common present-day
conception of the divine as “a being” that’s separate from the world and has various
superhuman qualities. Especially in the latter case, it’s quite unclear how we could
have knowledge of such a being.
I hope I’ve made it clear how this problem is solved by Plato’s notion of the
divine as extrapolating not human qualities like lust, anger, and jealousy but rather
such comparatively “superhuman” qualities, which nevertheless are part of our
experience, as self-government, justice, love, and “oneness.” This notion of Plato’s

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    201

makes the divine a part of our experience while at the same time showing how it
surpasses much of what we are. And in this way it shows how we can in fact have
direct knowledge of something that at the same time deserves to be described as
transcendent and “superhuman.”
Now, the progress we’ve made in understanding this subject should help us
to understand the status of the famous “mystical” images that we encounter in
the Republic, Symposium, and Phaedrus. In the Symposium, Plato has Diotima
say that “and there in life . . . there if anywhere should a person live his life, beholding
that Beauty” (211d). In the Republic, Socrates says of the real lover of learning that
“once getting near what really is and having intercourse with it and having
begotten understanding (nous) and truth he knows, truly lives, is nourished, and
. . . is relieved from the pains of giving birth” (490a-b). And later he says that
those who’ve been educated to the highest point would “refuse to act, thinking
that they had settled while still alive in the faraway Isles of the Blessed” (519c).
And in the Phaedrus, “It would awaken a terribly powerful love (deinous erotas) if
an image of wisdom (phronesis) came through our sight as clearly as beauty does.”
(250d). These can all be taken as allusions to (actual or possible) experiences of the
extraordinary kind that we have come to call “mystical experiences.”
Commentators on Plato often don’t have much to say about these allusions,
perhaps thinking that if one hasn’t had the kind of experience that Plato seems
to be alluding to, one can’t say very much about them. Or perhaps fearing that if
we acknowledge that Plato is interested in “mystical experiences,” we and Plato
may be dismissed as purveyors of what unfriendly critics call “New Age fluff.”
For my part, I’ve been suggesting since Chapter 1 that we don’t need to have the
extraordinary experiences that we call “mystical experiences” in order to have
full access to the truth that these experiences announce. For we have such access
frequently, in our everyday experiences of inner freedom, love, forgiveness, and so
forth, which don’t announce themselves as experiences of something transcendent
or divine, but which nevertheless are that. And with the help of spiritual teachers
like Plato, Rumi, Hegel, and Emerson, we can come to understand how these
“everyday” experiences are in fact experiences of something that’s transcendent
and that deserves to be called divine.
I’ll say some more in the next and final chapter about this issue of apparently
different ways of experiencing the transcendent and divine. What I want to point
out now is that like transcendence and divinity in general, what Plato says in these
famous passages is in principle just as accessible to those of us who haven’t had
extraordinary “mystical experiences” as it is to those who have had them.
For we can understand Plato’s remarks as commenting on the place at which we
arrive when we have understood, perhaps with his help, what is the real significance
and nature of our everyday experiences of inner freedom, love, and so forth;
namely, that these are experiences of something that’s transcendent and divine.
When we understand this, we have indeed (as it seems to me) arrived at something

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like the “Isles of the Blessed,” and we probably do feel a “terribly powerful love” for
this place. For we have indeed (metaphorically speaking) “begotten understanding
and truth,” about ourselves and the ultimate reality. So that we do indeed “truly
live,” we are indeed “nourished,” and we are indeed “relieved of the pains of giving
birth”—for we now know that we know God.21
Plato doesn’t say, in so many words, that we know God in everyday experience.
But he does make it clear, in both the Republic and the Symposium, that the
extraordinary experiences that he describes reveal the truth that was already
present in everyday experiences, but which we didn’t previously appreciate in them.
When Plato tells us that the objects that we experience in the world “participate”
in the Forms (Phaedo 100c, Parmenides 129a) he tells us that the world that we
experience is not completely separate from the “higher world” of the Forms. We
see this also in the fact that we (through our rational part) seek to be guided not
just by appetites and emotions but by what’s truly good. These are both ways in
which the Forms are present in the “lower world,” often without our being aware of
their presence as such. Likewise, nous or intellect or the “demiurge” is present, in
all of our endeavors, whether we are aware of it as such or not. In all of these ways,
the divine is present in our everyday doings, though in general we’re not aware of it
as such. Thus we can say that when Plato describes us as gaining direct knowledge
of the Form of the Good or the Beautiful, he is not describing us as encountering
something that we had never encountered before in any way. Rather, he’s describing
us as encountering it “itself by itself,” rather than (as we ordinarily encounter it)
mixed with much that’s other than it. This new awareness, the encountering it
“itself by itself,” is transformative enough; there’s no need for it to be an awareness
of a brand new object with which we had no previous acquaintance whatever. The
extraordinary experiences that Plato evokes are experiences of discovering what
was most real in what we’ve been experiencing all along.
Nor does this claim that we know God reflect any kind of hubris or grandiosity
on our part. For what we’re speaking of is precisely knowledge of the implications
of our own ongoing “ignorance” or questioning, our open-minded inner freedom,
which (to one degree or another) we share with everyone—and which constitutes
the most real thing, the greatest fulfillment. As Plato says, “There if anywhere
should a person live his life, beholding that Beauty.”
Arriving at this place can certainly be a prolonged and arduous process,
involving a considerable reorganization of one’s inner life. It isn’t always easy to
“obey thyself ” or to understand what that carries with it. But there is no reason
why this process must involve an extraordinary “mystical experience,” in the usual
sense of that phrase. The “terribly powerful love” and the other features that Plato
lists may be unfamiliar, and in that sense extraordinary, experiences, but they
differ from the usual “mystical experiences” in that they can continue indefinitely.
I’ll say more about this question in the next and final chapter.

PLATO ON “BECOMING LIKE GOD”    203

204
9 ORDINARY AND
EXTRAORDINARY
EXPERIENCES OF GOD

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
This is the breath of laws and songs and behaviour,
This is the tasteless water of souls. . . . this is the true sustenance.
WALT WHITMAN, LEAVES OF GRASS, “SONG OF MYSELF,” SEC. 17

I’ve shown how Plato lays the foundation for the sort of philosophy that, in Hegel
and other modern thinkers, resolves perennial issues about “inner” and “outer,”
mind and body, freedom and nature, ethics and rational self-government, value
and fact, and religion and science. I hope I’ve made their invaluable work more
accessible than it may have been previously.
In this final chapter, I want to say some more about how Plato and the others
interpret, in particular, what we call “religious experience.” And thus to contribute
something to the discussion that William James set in motion with his rich lectures
on The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

Our everyday experiences of God

I’ve been suggesting that our discoveries of inner freedom are experiences of
God. For through freedom, love, and forgiveness, we and the world become more
self-determining, more ourselves, and thus more fully real; and this fuller reality
is God.
 The dramatic experiences of liberation that we occasionally have can help us to
recognize and appreciate the many smaller experiences of liberation that we have
practically every day. And thus to realize that we experience God practically every
day, though we may not realize that God is what we’re experiencing. This is what
the poets of love, from Rumi through Wordsworth, Whitman, and Mary Oliver,
have been trying to help us to realize. When Whitman writes of the “common air
that bathes the globe” and that provides “the true sustenance” for souls, he’s evoking
the experience, which we have practically every day, of God as freedom and love.
This is why, in my comments about “mysticism,” I haven’t focused on any of the
supposedly definitive singular experiences that various mystical traditions describe
or allude to. I have focused instead on the more familiar multiple experiences of
inner freedom, free inquiry, forgiveness, and love. With the help of teachers like
Plato, Hegel, and the mystical poets, experiences of this kind can lead to the kind
of understanding of mysticism that I have been advocating in this book. What’s
more, however, they seem to me to be more definitive, more conclusive, than the
extraordinary experiences that we hear about.
I’ve explained why I think it makes sense to call experiences of liberation and
love experiences of God. They constitute something that’s more self-determining
and in that sense more fully real than our merely “mechanical” responses to the
external world. But if inner freedom, forgiveness, open-minded thought, and love
are what God is, we experience God whenever we experience them.1 Some of us
less often and some of us more often, we all have these experiences, which give us
direct access to God.2
Extraordinary “mystical experiences” may well be absolutely conclusive for the
people who experience them. But it’s always open to bystanders to ask why they should
be convinced by an experience that they themselves haven’t had. Indeed, the person
who has had the experience might still wonder, when she’s no longer immediately
“in its grip,” what exactly she is justified in concluding on the basis of the experience.
By contrast, the common experiences of inner freedom, forgiveness, and so
forth don’t convince us by sheer power, and they don’t go away and stay away
for long periods, as extraordinary experiences tend to do. Instead, the common
experiences convince us by presenting something that we can see is always
available to us, whenever we open our minds and hearts. That’s why I call these
common experiences more definitive than the extraordinary ones.
It’s certainly true that most of us don’t realize that these common experiences
give us access to God. Western cultures tend to dismiss the idea that ordinary
people can experience God. We’re told either that there is no God or that God is a
separate being whom most people can know only through faith, and not through
personal experience.
In fact, even most of what we read about “mysticism” has the (probably
unintended) effect of reinforcing, through its emphasis on extraordinary
experiences, the assumption that most people don’t and won’t experience God.

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Teaching like that of Plato, Hegel, Rumi, or Walt Whitman, which might overcome
these unfortunate influences by showing us the great significance of our everyday
experiences, isn’t available to everyone, everywhere.
Against the assumption that most people don’t and won’t experience God, Eckhart
Tolle writes that “I don’t call it finding God, because how can you find that which was
never lost, the very life that you are? . . . There can be no subject-object relationship
here, no duality, no you and God. God-realization is the most natural thing there is.”3
And he describes this God-realization as the result of “surrender to what is.”4
I would add that this “very life that you are,” or this “what is”—that is, what
really is, in you—is your everyday dreams of and efforts toward inner freedom
and love. These dreams and efforts are the presence within you of something that’s
higher, more self-determining, and thus more fully real than your everyday self-
importance, desires, suffering, and so forth. Because you are already intimately
familiar with these dreams and efforts, you are already intimately familiar with
something that’s higher, more self-determining, and more fully real—that is, you
are already intimately familiar with God.
I associate this presence of God within us with the Buddhist doctrine that
Buddha nature is always present in everything—that (as I gather that some say)
“everything is a Buddha.” (And likewise with the Vedanta doctrine that Atman
is Brahman.) We have only to realize what we have always been. I do think it’s
helpful, for this purpose, to spell out in ordinary language how these things are
true, as I have tried to do in this book.

What our extraordinary experiences do

and don’t accomplish
But even a person who has received the teaching of someone like Plato, Hegel,
Rumi, or Whitman may be reluctant to abandon the comfort of assumptions that
they’ve been used to all their lives. This is why the extraordinary experiences that
“mystics” report often have a major impact on the people who have them. They
break through the assumptions that most of us have lived with for most of our
lives—that God can’t be experienced directly, but is only an object of “faith” and
may not even exist, so that a person who claims to have experienced God is not
making sense and may be just plain crazy.
William James collected many reports of experiences that announced
themselves as experiences of something divine in his The Varieties of Religious
Experience. Here is one example:

We were on our sixth day of tramping. . . . I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor
thirst, and my state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news

ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCES OF GOD    207

 from home. . . . I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling
it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being
raised above myself, I felt the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was
conscious of it—as if his goodness and power were penetrating me altogether.
The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on
and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and
my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he
had taught me to know him. . . . Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I
felt that God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted, and I was
able to walk on, but very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the interior
emotion. . . . The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes. . . . [In
it,] God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my
consciousness perceived him.5

This person obviously was profoundly moved by his experience. We are probably
quite moved by reading it. It seems churlish to ask what (if anything) he really
knew as a result of his experience, and what we can know as a result of reading
his story. But these are reasonable questions, and there is a small library of cool,
analytical books that address them.6 I myself am inclined to think that all that
this man could really know on the basis of this experience alone was that he
had in fact had a profound emotional experience. Not that he had actually felt
“God.”
But I’m not interested in arguing for this conclusion. As you know from what
I’ve been saying, I have a different approach to this whole issue. I’m convinced
that as far as the knowledge of God is concerned, we don’t need to decide whether
experiences like the one that this man had are “veridical.” We don’t need to decide
this because there are good reasons to think that we can and do know God directly;
that is (in the first dictionary sense of the word) we can and do have “mystical”
knowledge of God, regardless of “mystical experiences” like the one that this writer
reported.
“Mystical experiences” are important not as the basis of our knowledge of
God, but simply (and this is importance enough) because they often help us
dramatically in getting beyond the groundless but powerful assumptions that I
mentioned. That is, the assumptions that God can’t be experienced directly, but
is only an object of “faith” and may not even exist, so that a person who claims to
have experienced God is not making sense and may be just plain crazy. Someone
who has “felt the presence of God” or has been moved by the story of such an
experience is likely to question these assumptions in a way that someone who
hasn’t felt that presence or been moved by such a story is less likely to question
them. This is why many of us are fascinated by stories of mystical experiences.
They encourage us to put our familiar assumptions in brackets and consider
looking at the world in a different way.

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“Ordinary” experiences are more definitive
What the writers in the Platonic tradition do, then, is to provide those of us who
have this interest in looking at the world in a different way with a worked-out
account of such a way, which shows how we do actually know God. They show
us that we know God through our everyday experiences of inner freedom, love,
forgiveness, and so forth, which don’t announce themselves as experiences of
something divine but which we nevertheless have good reasons to understand as
being that.
These experiences are relevant because the only God that’s truly infinite, and
thus truly transcendent, is composed of experiences like these. It’s truly transcendent
because not being separate from us, this God isn’t bounded by us and thus limited
in the way that all separate and bounded things are. And it’s “God” because it’s self-
determining, real as itself, and perfectly loving.
So these experiences of freedom, love, forgiveness, and so forth are the way
in which God is present, in our lives. We know God directly through these
experiences because what we have good grounds for regarding as aspects of God
as such are immediately present in them. By contrast, in a “mystical experience”
such as the one whose description I quoted, in which “God” is “felt” to be present,
we have no grounds for regarding the presence as divine except the overwhelming
conviction of the person who had the experience. Whereas in our experiences
of freedom, love, and so forth, God (rather than being “felt” to be present) can
be known by us as identical with the experience itself. God can be known by us in
this way, in these experiences, because thinkers like Plato and Hegel have given
us good reasons to believe that experiences like these are what God is composed
of. So that God’s presence in these cases isn’t open to question in the way that a
“feeling” of his presence which is conveyed to us by an otherwise unknown faculty
is open to question.
Of course, one can also question Plato’s and Hegel’s interpretation of these
everyday experiences of freedom, love, and forgiveness as being the immediate
presence of God. There can be plenty of discussion about that. My point is that
the way Plato and Hegel interpret these experiences doesn’t involve inferring the
existence of something that’s supposed to be separate from the experiences, as
interpreting a “feeling” as being caused by God evidently must.7
So if we understand how our everyday experiences of freedom, love, forgiveness,
and so forth help to constitute God, we’ll see that our having knowledge of God
needn’t involve extraordinary experiences such as the state of ecstasy whose
description I quoted. Through our everyday experiences, we already know God, in
the most direct and conclusive way possible.
And by “we,” I mean all of us, including the many people who have no idea that
they know God, and may indeed doubt or deny that there is any God. Whether
we’re aware of it or not, we know the true God.

ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCES OF GOD    209

 Our everyday experiences contain a wealth that we don’t ordinarily suspect.
Whereas our extraordinary experiences, emotionally overpowering though they
very likely are, are less cognitively rich than they may initially seem. Because
it’s doubtful whether, when we take them as “extraordinary,” they give us direct
knowledge of anything but themselves.8

We should line up extraordinary

experiences with ordinary ones
It’s only insofar as we see our extraordinary experiences as ordinary, and line them
up alongside the innumerable other experiences that give us access to God because
they are God, that they too give us this access. Insofar as, like our moments of
freedom and open-minded thought, a “feeling of God’s presence” manifests some
kind of loving intelligence, perhaps in our unconscious mind, it too helps to
constitute God. It helps to constitute God because it’s yet another instance of love’s
presence in one’s life. But then rather than being a special source of knowledge, it’s
on the same plane as one’s many other “ordinary” sources of knowledge of God.
It’s only when we interpret the extraordinary experience as one of a large number
of experiences, most of them comparatively “ordinary,” that constitute God, that it
does in fact help us to know God.
When we put this man’s report of his ecstatic experience in this context, some
interesting details emerge. What does he mean when he says that he “experienced
a feeling of being raised above himself ” and follows this with the statement that
he “felt the presence of God”? We can safely assume that his “being raised above
himself ” was not a literal being lifted up in space. Rather, I imagine, it was a
metaphorical raising “above” his ordinary self: the same kind of raising that we
see in the Platonic allegories of exiting the Cave, and so forth. When he adds that
it was “as if [God’s] goodness and power were penetrating me altogether,” we can
associate this, similarly, with Platonism’s doctrine that God is within us. Where
what’s “within” often seems to “penetrate” us from outside inasmuch as God
transcends our ordinary selves and often comes upon us without our expecting it,
because it isn’t what our ordinary self had in mind at all.
So this man’s overpowering experience contained much of the conceptual
structure that we’re familiar with from our exploration of the Platonic literature.
And which we can readily connect with our “everyday” experiences of our own
“rising above” our prior self in the sense of our prior appetites, opinions, and so
forth, and consequently acquiring a new or renewed sense of who or what we
really are. The only difference being that the entire syndrome came upon this man
all at once, as it were, and apart from any apparent specific prior issue. Perhaps his
life had simply made him ready, at this point in time, to learn in an explicit way

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what it had for a long time implicitly been about. As he says, God “in the course of
my life . . . had taught me to know him.”
If what I’ve just said is correct, then this man’s powerful “feeling of God’s
presence” was similar in important respects to the (mostly) more everyday
experiences that Platonism identifies as aspects of God. And in that way it does in
fact confirm, as far as a single experience can, the general Platonic understanding
of our knowledge of God. While once again undermining the idea that this
knowledge depends in essential ways on extraordinary experiences that we don’t
encounter in our everyday lives. For what this man “discovered” seems likely
to have already been present for a long time in his life, in less explicit and less
overwhelming forms.

What mysticism and religion

are actually about
Whatever the truth may be about this particular case, it turns out, if what I’ve
been suggesting over all is correct, that the direct experience of God needn’t be
primarily a matter of the extraordinary experiences that we usually call “mystical
experiences.” Rather, it can be a matter of the everyday experiences of freedom,
love, forgiveness, and so forth, which we can come to appreciate as constituting
God.
And indeed this is true of religion in general, of which mysticism in this sense
turns out to be an indispensable part. If Platonic philosophy has contributed
something vital and indispensable to religion, it’s the understanding of the way
freedom, love, forgiveness, and open-minded thought constitute God. For this
shows us that religion is about what’s transcendent in everyone’s experience, rather
than being about a being that’s outside the experience of most of us. So that
religion is transcendent by being rational (rather than by being mysterious), and
it’s rational by transcending (rather than by merely “calculating”). From the fact
that transcendence goes beyond “calculation,” we got the idea that it’s not rational
at all, which gave rise to our ongoing disputes between science and religion. But
rational mysticism explains how this was all unnecessary, since true transcendence
itself is rational in the sense that it reflects thought, and thus can be and is part of
our everyday experience.
My suggestion, then, is that our relationship to God, which is celebrated by
mysticism and by religion, doesn’t primarily have to do either with mystery or
with extraordinary “mystical experiences.” Nor does it primarily have to do with
the extraordinary experiences that have been had by “prophets” and teachers.
Rather, it has to do with the endless, everyday experience of inner freedom, love,
forgiveness, and open-minded thought, in which every one of us participates to

ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCES OF GOD    211

some degree and in some way. These are mysterious enough from the point of view
of calculating, self-centered “reason.” But we all understand them, nevertheless,
from our everyday experience of them.
In fact, it’s only this everyday experience of inner freedom, love, forgiveness,
and so forth that enables us to understand and find relevant the extraordinary
experiences that we hear about and the teachings that we receive from mystics,
prophets, and other religious teachers. We find what we receive from them
intelligible and relevant only insofar as we ourselves have had a taste of inner
freedom, love, forgiveness, and so forth. What this means is that we judge the
experiences and teachings of these extraordinary figures, and we ought to judge
them, by the same standards by which we judge ourselves and our own experiences,
namely, by the “higher” authority that we find in some of our own experiences,
and not in others.
We, the “ordinary” people, who distinguish between our own “ordinary”
experiences in the course of our own everyday “identity crises,” are in charge here,
whether we realize this or not. Since the issue is how we should live our lives, we
had better be in charge.
And of course the really great teachers recognize this state of affairs. Homer
shows that even Achilles can go beyond his self-centeredness and his enmity. Plato
says that “the power to learn is in everyone’s soul” (Republic 518c; see Chapter 6).
The Buddha tells us to “be a lamp unto ourselves.” Jesus says that “the last shall be
first” (Mt. 20:16), that is, that the highest is the highest only insofar as the lowliest
freely acknowledge it, because they embody it.
So the highest authority can’t be in someone else’s experience. It must be in
everyone’s experience. As in William Blake’s grains of sand and wild flowers, and
Walt Whitman’s leaves of grass:

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
This is the breath of laws and songs and behaviour,
This is the tasteless water of souls. . . . this is the true sustenance.9

To be inspired by this air or breath, and fed by this water or true sustenance, we
need only become aware of ourselves, of what we constantly do. Of our freedom
and the resulting love, or love and the resulting freedom. This is the highest, the
most central and most real; this is what we are when we really are.

212   P HILOSOPHICAL MYSTICISM IN PLATO, HEGEL, AND THE PRESENT

APPENDIX: COMPARISONS
BETWEEN THE PLATO/
HEGEL ARGUMENT FOR
A GOD WITHIN US, AND
SEVERAL WELL-KNOWN
ARGUMENTS FOR GOD

The well-known arguments for God’s existence that we find in authors like St.
Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, and C. S. Lewis can be understood as attempting
to achieve the level of generality that the less well-known Plato/Hegel argument
achieves. It’s the failure of these well-known arguments to achieve the generality
that Plato and Hegel achieve, that prevents the well-known arguments from being
fully convincing.

C. S. Lewis’s argument from the

Moral Law
Consider C. S. Lewis’s argument from our consciousness of the Moral Law, which
he presented in his book, Mere Christianity, first published in 1952 and still selling
briskly. Lewis thinks it’s clear that the Moral Law cannot have been instilled in us
by nature, but must have been inserted into us by something “like a mind” which
is “outside the universe.”1 And this thing that’s like a mind, outside the universe,
he suggests, is what God is. So from our consciousness of the Moral Law, we can
conclude that God exists.
You might ask why our sense of a “moral law” couldn’t have been produced
in us by a process of evolution by natural selection. It would reflect the survival
advantages that our species presumably derives from its members’ not murdering
each other, not stealing from each other, and so forth. To this, Lewis replies that the
Moral Law that he’s talking about isn’t just whatever constraints we may feel that
could serve that particular evolutionary purpose. Rather, it’s the ultimate standard
by which we judge between whatever feelings we have about what we should do. It’s
well known that such feelings often conflict with each other. We need only think
of the difficulties that we get into in connection with issues like abortion or war,
where strong moral feelings pull us in opposing directions. The Moral Law itself,
Lewis says, is the standard by which we decide which of our competing feelings
should actually govern our decision.2
So the Moral Law has a kind of “authority” that no particular feeling has; and
we can’t simultaneously respect that authority, as Lewis assumes that we do, and
assert that it’s merely the result of a process of evolution. Imagine a writer who
tells us that morality can be explained as a product of evolution, and also claims
to think that it’s only the survival advantage to her species that explains why she
herself thinks that it would be wrong for her to kill her parents. So if it turned
out that her species would actually benefit from her killing her parents, then she
would decide that it would be perfectly alright for her to kill them, after all. We
might wonder whether her feelings on this subject really amount to what we think
of as “morality.” Does she recognize nothing about her relationship to her parents,
entirely apart from any consequences it may have for her species, that makes
murdering them unacceptable?
I agree with Lewis’s argument completely, up to this point. It’s another version
of the thought that I expressed in Chapters 1 and 3—that we seek to be guided by
something that has more authority than our initial feelings and opinions. “God,”
Lewis is saying, is that higher authority. But, investigating what this “God” is,
why should we suppose that the authority that the Moral Law has, results from
its having been inserted into us by something that’s “outside the universe”? It’s not
immediately clear why something that’s outside the universe should have more
authority over us than something that’s inside it. If Lewis says that the authority
comes from the fact that the mind-like thing that’s outside the universe created us,
we still need to know why we should think that that fact gives it authority over us.
Clearly, Lewis needs to say more about where this mind-like thing’s authority
comes from. Plato and Hegel do say more. They explain the divine Law’s authority
by understanding the divine not as separate from and opposed to (flatly “outside”)
the universe, but as the universe’s own going beyond itself through our search for
a higher authority than our initial, externally generated desires and opinions. The
divine Law deserves our respect and obedience because it results from or responds
to our trying to be guided by something that has more authority than our initial,
externally generated desires and opinions. What results from or responds to this
must possess this authority.
The Plato/Hegel argument for God resembles Lewis’s argument in taking as
its point of departure the way moral thinking points beyond the merely natural
world. (In Plato’s and Hegel’s case, the point of departure isn’t just our moral

214   A PPENDIX
thinking but our thinking about what we should be guided by, in general.) But
as we’ve just seen, the Plato/Hegel argument does a better job than Lewis does of
explaining where God’s authority and morality’s authority come from—what it is
that makes this “mind-like thing” higher.

St Thomas Aquinas’s argument for a

“first mover”
A second example is St Thomas Aquinas’s famous argument, in his Summa
theologica (1265–74), for a “first mover.” Aquinas argues that “whatever is in
motion must be put in motion by another,” but “this cannot go on to infinity,
because then there would be no first mover, and consequently no other mover; . . .
as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand.” The “first mover”
that must therefore exist, he says is “what everyone understands to be God.”3
This argument strongly resembles Plato’s argument in Laws x, which I
summarized in Chapter 8. The historical link between the two is Aristotle’s notion
of a “prime mover,” in his On the heavens, which St. Thomas studied.
Bertrand Russell and other critics object to arguments like these that they see
no reason why there shouldn’t be an infinite series of “movers,” receding endlessly
into the past. Why should we suppose that there’s any similarity between the case
of a “staff,” and the case of the universe? Apart from Plato and Hegel, I haven’t
found a persuasive suggestion as to how Aquinas could effectively answer these
objections.
What Plato’s and Hegel’s discussions of God suggest is that Aquinas probably
assumes that reality must ultimately be more self-determining than the members
of Russell’s infinite series of “movers” can be. Reality must ultimately be what it is
by virtue of itself, and not always by virtue of its relation to something other than
itself; and it’s hard to see how the infinite series, as a collection, could achieve a
self-determination that none of its members, taken individually, can achieve. This
is what gives relevance to Aquinas’s analogy of the staff that “moves only because
it is put in motion by the hand”: We imagine that the owner of the hand is self-
determining in a way that the staff is not. The universe can’t depend on something
other than itself for its basic character, as the staff depends on the person who uses
it for its basic character. Or if the universe does depend on something else for its
basic character, there had better not be an infinite regress of dependings, because
that can’t produce self-determination.
Aquinas isn’t assuming a supernatural “mind,” as such; he’s merely assuming
that the ultimate reality shouldn’t rely on something else to make it what it is. This
is precisely Hegel’s explicit primary assumption, in his account of what constitutes
full “reality.” Hegel spells out what Aquinas doesn’t, and thus he presents an

APPENDIX    215
argument that while resembling Aquinas’s, is more complete and thus more
plausible than Aquinas’s.
As I suggested in Chapter 8, the gist of Hegel’s argument appears to have been
laid out much earlier in Plato’s arguments in the Republic, Timaeus, and Philebus
regarding transcendence, unity, and the Good. And neither Plato’s argument nor
Hegel’s depends upon the specific, Aristotelian cosmology that Aquinas adopts.
So the demise of Aristotle’s cosmology, in modern times, doesn’t affect the Plato/
Hegel argument.

St Anselm’s ontological argument

A final traditional argument for God’s existence is known as the “Ontological
Argument.” St Anselm proposed it in his Proslogion (1077–78), and Rene Descartes
and other modern thinkers presented versions of it. This argument appeals to the
common definition of God as “the sum of all perfections.” It then points out that
something that exists is surely more perfect than something that doesn’t exist; so
that God, who is the sum of all perfections, must exist.
Immanuel Kant criticized this argument by distinguishing existence from other
predicates like goodness, blueness, and so forth. He argued that we have to be able
to think of a thing’s qualities apart from the question of whether the thing exists
or not. So that we can say that a good blue dog is the same thing, a good blue dog,
regardless of whether it exists or not. But if it’s the same thing, it must have the
same qualities. So its existence can’t be one of its qualities, in the way that goodness
and blueness are.
Because of Kant’s critique, the “ontological argument” hasn’t been widely
accepted in the last couple of centuries. It seems too outrageously paradoxical
to suggest that simply by inspecting something’s definition, as “the sum of all
perfections,” you can conclude that it must exist.
However, the argument for God that I’ve given you from Plato and Hegel
captures something that seems to be genuinely valid, in the ontological argument.
The Plato/Hegel argument focuses on what I’ve called full reality, or reality as
oneself, and suggests that the way to achieve such reality is through freedom and
love. Secondly, it argues that if such reality is achieved, then there is a highest
reality composed of freedom and love, which lends nature whatever full reality it
possesses, and fulfills individuals in a way that nothing else can. (This is what we
call “God.”) And thirdly it argues that anyone who discusses these matters with an
open mind, acts in a way that embodies the freedom and love that constitute the
highest reality; so the highest reality is, to some extent at least, achieved.
This argument resembles the ontological argument in that its starting point
is the concept of a highest, or full, reality, and it proceeds by arguing, as the
ontological argument does, that there’s something about the concept of a highest

216   A PPENDIX
reality that makes it very difficult to deny that such a reality exists. According to
Plato and Hegel, what makes it difficult to deny that the highest reality exists is
that when we engage in argument, we seem to presuppose the presence of freedom
and love, which (however) constitute the highest reality. So simply engaging in
argument, presupposes God; much as, according to Anselm’s argument, simply
thinking about God, presupposes God’s existence. Plato and Hegel bring out a
“practical” side to Anselm’s argument, which Anselm didn’t bring out: that the
activity of argument, or searching for the truth, has a divine quality.
And this seems like the right direction to move in, to reformulate Anselm’s
argument, since surely it’s our activity of questioning our initial ideas and trying
to find more adequate ones that gives plausibility to the idea of a “higher” and
more perfect being, in the first place. So it’s because of the phenomenon of free
and loving “ascent,” which Plato and Hegel bring to our attention, that people
have taken seriously the possibility of the most perfect being that is the topic of
Anselm’s argument. And, indeed, our experience of free and loving “ascent” is the
best evidence we could have of the reality of this being.

APPENDIX    217
NOTES

Introduction, pp. 1–8

1 When I say that we have “direct” knowledge of a higher reality or God, I don’t mean
that this knowledge is simple and requires no interpretation or thought. What I mean
is that we know this higher reality or God by (in part) being it, rather than through
some channel that leads from it to us.
2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.7, 1177a14–15. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle
tells us that “since there is someone who is even above the student of nature (for
nature [phusis] is one particular genus of what there is), the investigation of these
things must also belong to him whose inquiry is universal and deals with primary
substance. The study of nature is also a kind of wisdom but it is not the primary kind”
(Metaphysics IV.3, 1005a32–35). So what is higher or “divine” is not only “in us,” it is
a feature of being as being. For a detailed account of how Aristotle is, in an important
sense, a “Platonist,” see Lloyd Gerson (2005). On the Metaphysics passage, see Irad
Kimhi (2018), p. 27.
3 G. W. F. Hegel, HSL p. 149; SuW 5:164; GW 21:136. “The real,” here, is das Reale. The
infinite is “real” because, unlike the finite, it’s self-determining. It makes itself what it
is.
4 A. N. Whitehead (1933), p. 25.
5 Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916 (1961), October 8, 1916. The “ladder” image is in
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), 6.54.
6 Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916 (1961), October 7, 1916.
7 J. N. Findlay (1967), p. 197. More details on this in Chapter 2.
8 Thomas Nagel (2012), p. 17.
9 John McDowell (1994) and (2009), Michael Thompson (2008), Sebastian Rödl
(2007), (2012), and (2018), Andrea Kern (2017), Wolfram Gobsch (2013) and (2017),
and Irad Kimhi (2018). I discuss McDowell and Rödl in Chapter 2, below. Regarding
Kimhi, see my next note.
10 Irad Kimhi endorses Aristotle’s view that (as Kimhi puts it) “nature is a whole . . .
but a limited one, since ‘there is someone still further above the student of nature’:
the philosopher,” who (in Kimhi’s view, which he clearly imputes to Aristotle as well)
studies “the logical ‘I’” ([2018], p. 27 and p. 2). (I quoted in note 2 of this chapter, the
passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics to which Kimhi is alluding.) Accordingly, Kimhi
gives an extensive critique, in his Chapters 1 and 2, of Gottlob Frege (1848–1925),
 one of the founding figures of “analytic philosophy,” for whom an association of
logic with the “I” or with “self-consciousness” would amount to an unacceptable
“psychologism.” Sebastian Rödl presents a parallel critique of Frege in his (2012),
Chapter 1, and (2018), Chapter 2. When we reinstall the “I” in its place of authority in
logic and metaphysics we reestablish the traditional hierarchy of the rational self vis-
à-vis nonrational beings, not, however, as a separate being or domain, but as a mode
of functioning in which the nonrational goes beyond or surpasses its nonrationality.
This nondualistic hierarchy is the primary subject of this book.

Chapter 1: “A Worm! A God!”, pp. 9–28

1 Lloyd Gerson says that from Plato’s Republic “we learn that an embodied person
is an ongoing identity crisis” ([2003], pp. 123–24). I have the impression that my
presentation, inspired by Plato, of this “crisis” largely agrees with what Gerson finds in
Plato.
2 By “inner freedom” I mean the inner process by which we make decisions, as opposed
to the outer circumstances such as coercion by other people which may reduce what we
might call our “outer freedom” (the options that are available for us to choose between).
We can have what I call “inner freedom” regardless of what our outer circumstances
may be if, as I say, we make up our own minds what to do. And when I speak of making
up our own minds, I mean a process that involves some kind of thought, as opposed
to simply doing whatever pops into one’s head. I think we are often aware of not really
making up our minds but simply reacting to desires or urges and postponing or choosing
not to engage in the sort of thought that’s involved in making up our minds. When we
do this, we lack what I’m calling inner freedom. From this I hope it’s clear that I’m not
addressing the question of whether we have what many people call “free will,” by which
they mean the ability to act in a way that we’re not “caused” to act. I think that what most
of us primarily care about is not what “causes” what we do (which is perhaps a rather
abstruse question), but whether we can really make up our minds what to do. (Certainly
the two questions might be related, through some sort of high-level discussion.) It seems
that we could hardly care about what we believe and what we do, if we truly believed that
we don’t ever really make up our minds what to believe or do. I’ll discuss these issues in
Chapter 3 and especially Chapter 7.
3 Socrates praises the “examined life” in Plato, Apology of Socrates 38a. Plato suggests
his explanation of Socrates’s praise in Republic books iv-vii, which I’ll discuss in
Chapters 5 and 6. The pursuit of truth and inner freedom (the “examined life”)
needn’t prevent one from pursuing “lower” goals as well; it simply requires that the
lower goals must be consistent with truth and inner freedom. The “usual assumption”
that the self is equally present in any project, whether the project is “higher” or
“lower,” was advocated in ancient times by Protagoras and Epicurus, among others,
and in modern times by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Bertrand
Russell, and Bernard Williams (1986). Versions of the “contrasting view,” that the
pursuit of truth and inner freedom makes us real as ourselves in a way that other
pursuits don’t, are advocated by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the “Neoplatonists,”
Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Emerson, and in our time by writers including Gary Watson
(1975), Charles Taylor (Introduction and papers 1-5 in [1985], volume 1), Susan Wolf
(1990), and Sebastian Rödl (2007, 2012, 2018).

NOTES    219
4 I’m less interested in the question of who influenced whom, historically, than in the
question of what’s true. But it does seem likely that Indian thought influenced early
Greek thinkers, through contacts via well-documented trade routes. The influence
may have run in the opposite direction, later on. See Thomas McEvilley (2002). The
“modern” global dialogue is by no means the first one.
5 Karl Rahner (1978), p. 63. Fiona Ellis (2014) drew this passage in Rahner to my
attention. Hegel articulated the same objection to conceptions of God as a separate
being, in his critique of what he called the “spurious infinity” (schlechte Unendlichkeit),
in his Science of Logic (1812–14) and elsewhere. I explain Hegel’s critique in several
chapters below and in chapter 3 of Wallace (2005).
6 Or, if you prefer, God could be the “outside” of the world, meaning that as the source of
all that’s real in the world, God surpasses it in all ways. (Is this the thought that inspires
what people call “panentheism”?) Neither of these metaphors, that “God is inside the
world” and that “the world is inside God,” is meant to be taken literally as a statement
about the spatial arrangement of two separate beings, so we don’t have to interpret
them as contradicting each other. I’ll explain in Chapter 8 how Plato’s comments about
the divine can be understood as making it more “inner” than the world (and equally
more “outer,” in the sense of transcendent).
7 St Paul, Acts 17:28, “In him [that is, God] we live and move and have our being”;
Augustine, Confessions, III.vi (11), “You [that is, God] were more inward [to me] than
my most inward part.” Paul’s and Augustine’s God is certainly “higher” than Paul
or Augustine, but evidently not entirely separate from them. Many “Fathers of the
Church” refer to the possibility of humans’ theosis or “becoming God,” which would
hardly be possible if God were simply a separate being from us. “The Word of God
became man, that thou mayest learn from man how man can become God” (Clement
of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen, ch. 1, par. 871). (See the Wikipedia article,
“Divinization [Christian],” citing among many other sources the Catechism of the
Catholic Church; and for commentary see Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A.
Wittung, eds. [2007].) Thus when Sam Harris (2014), p. 21, describes the Abrahamic
religions as “incorrigibly dualistic . . . the human soul is conceived of as genuinely
separate from the reality of God,” he overlooks a considerable quantity of more or
less “canonical” Christian writings. In recent times, A. N. Whitehead spoke of “the
inclusion of God in every creature”: “The world lives by its incarnation of God in
itself ” ([1926/1996], pp. 94, 156). Karl Rahner wrote, “That God really does not exist
who operates and functions as an individual existent alongside other existents, and
who would thus as it were be a member of the larger household of all reality” ([1978],
p. 63). According to Paul Tillich, “To call God transcendent . . . does not mean that
one must establish a ‘superworld’ of divine objects. It does mean that, within itself,
the finite world points beyond itself. In other words, it is self-transcendent” ([1957],
vol. 2, pp. 6–7). Though Tillich didn’t credit Hegel, what Tillich is driving at here is
made much clearer by Hegel in the accounts (in his Science of Logic and elsewhere)
on which I draw in this book. It’s certainly true that numerous writers have assumed
that “God” would be “a being,” and thus apparently quite separate from us. (A few
random recent examples are Timothy A. Robinson [2002], p. xv, Owen Flanagan
[2007], p. 259 note 11, and Ronald Dworkin [2013], p. 17.) And the same writer may
slip from one way of describing God to another. But I think I’ve said enough to show
that the conception of God as a separate being is not the only “traditional” religious
conception in the west.

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 8 The common theme of “negative theology” that we can’t know God because God
is unlike anything that we are familiar with reflects the important truth that unlike
the things around us, God is not “a being.” So we can’t know God in the way that we
know the things around us. But Platonism points out that in the same way, and for
the same reason, we can’t know ourselves. For, because of our ongoing “identity crisis,”
we too are not simply “beings,” in the way that (say) rocks might be. But it seems
clear that once we give up the notion that we are “beings,” we can know ourselves,
namely through our awareness of our efforts to be free, and so forth. And in that way,
Platonism says, we know God as well.
9 As a description of our fundamental challenge, the term “nihilism” was introduced by
F. H. Jacobi and made famous by Friedrich Nietzsche. In his Nihilism (1969), Stanley
Rosen refers frequently to Plato and to Hegel, but he doesn’t focus on Plato’s account
of the soul’s self-government or Hegel’s corresponding account of inner freedom,
which make it clear why a human being can’t ultimately be satisfied by nihilism.
10 A particularly illuminating psychological account of aspects of nihilism is Donald
Kalsched (2013).
11 In addition to Plato, Hegel, Emerson, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, J. N. Findlay, and
Iris Murdoch, western philosopher mystics who left more or less systematic writings
include Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Pseudo-
Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi,
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, Nicolas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Henry More, Ralph
Cudworth, Nicolas Malebranche, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, F. W. J. Schelling, F. H.
Bradley, J. M. E. McTaggart, and Henri Bergson.
12 Regarding the notion of mysticism as “other-worldly,” it may be that Irwin and
Adamson were led to this interpretation by the work of J. N. Findlay, who speaks
of mysticism’s “other-worldly geography” and the like. I criticize Findlay’s account
in Chapter 2. When Irwin and Adamson use Findlay’s term as though it captures
a defining characteristic of “mysticism,” they neglect the more central traditional
notion of a direct knowledge of God or the ultimate reality.
13 One could object that Plato and Hegel often seem to speak of “God” in the common
way, not as “in” the world but as a separate being. With regard to Plato, as I’ll
explain in Chapters 5 and 8, this objection underestimates the implications of (a)
his doctrine of higher degrees of reality in which the lower degrees “participate,”
(b) his description of the rational part of the soul as “divine” (Timaeus 90a), and
(c) his evident view (Timaeus 29e-30a) that because God cannot be “jealous,” God
(the demiurge) has to create a world. These doctrines mean that God is clearly not
“separate” from the world in the way that we often suppose. As far as I can see, the
“mystical” interpretation is the only one that takes proper account of these features
of Plato’s writings. As for Hegel, my Hegel book (Wallace [2005]) shows in detail how
he presents the divine as present in the world and directly knowable by us. Hegel
didn’t explicitly describe himself as a “mystic,” but he came very close to doing so.
In §82A of his Encyclopedia Logic (which is an extract from a lecture) he is reported
as saying that “the meaning of the speculative [that is, of his own preferred kind of
philosophy] is to be understood as being the same as what used in earlier times to be
called ‘mystical’ . . . . When we speak of ‘the mystical’ nowadays, it is taken as a rule
to be synonymous with what is mysterious and incomprehensible. . . . [However,]
‘the mystical’ is certainly something mysterious, but only for the understanding” (i.e.,
for Verstand, as opposed to Reason or Vernunft, on which “speculative” philosophy

NOTES    221
 is based). In his LPR, Hegel makes the same identification of mysticism with
“speculative philosophy” (LPR 3:280, VPR 3:206) and describes the “unio mystica”
as supposing that “God alone is true actuality, [so that] insofar as I have actuality
I have it only in God” (LPR 1:444-445, VPR 1:332-333), which is a doctrine that
we encounter repeatedly in his own works. Plus, he showed enthusiasm for such
acknowledged mystics as Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Jelaluddin Rumi, and Jakob
Boehme. For more on Hegel’s rational mysticism, see Wallace (2005), pp. 104–9, 256
and (2010–2011), pp. 123–35.
14 If we had no trace of freedom, truth, love, or beauty in ourselves, we wouldn’t be
able to imagine what they could be, or dream of having them. So one might say that
“philo-sophia,” the “love of wisdom,” already is wisdom, to a significant degree. (This
of course does not require that this “wisdom” takes the form of “propositions” for
whose truth one has evidence.)
15 Heinrich Heine (1981), p. 47, (1860), vol. 5, p. 99. Stanley Rosen makes the same
mistake as Heine when he writes that “one may say that Hegel makes the suppression
of nihilism dependent upon hybris, or the sanctioning of man’s desire to be a god”
([1969], p. 234). Since hybris has everything to do with self-importance, someone
who has become “divine” by transcending ordinary human self-importance is hardly
engaged in hybris. See also the references in note 7 in this chapter to Christian
teachings on theiosis or “becoming God.”
16 Eckhart Tolle (1999), p. 187.
17 Insofar as it celebrates science, freedom, goodness, and so forth, humanism is beyond
reproach. But insofar as it fails to identify the way in which these constitute what
transcendence, infinity, and religion are about, it is limited and unfree. I discuss
Ludwig Feuerbach’s doctrine that humans, as such, are God in Chapter 3.
18 A. N. Whitehead (1925/1996), pp. 155–56.
19 “Auguries of Innocence,” in William Blake (2005), p. 295.
20 On millenarian and apocalyptic hopes and terrorism, see Norman Cohn (1957/1970),
and F. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment and The Possessed. It’s possible to see some
of this impatience in Plato’s writings as well, but there it’s combined (as I’ll explain in
Chapter 5) with the reconciliation that I describe here.
21 I will say some more about the issue of forgiving imperfection in Chapter 6.
22 The integrative efforts of Huston Smith (1976), Bernard McGinn (1991–), and Ken
Wilber (2000) draw on Plato and, in some cases, on Hegel. Specialists in Plato and/
or Hegel who defend rational mysticism (though not always under that name) are
A. J. Festugiere (1935/1975), J. N. Findlay (1967) and (1974), Werner Beierwaltes
(1972/2004), Jens Halfwassen (1992) and (1999/2005), Lloyd Gerson (2003) and
(2013), and David J. Yount (2014) and (2017). I discuss Findlay in Chapter 2.
23 Insofar as beauty and the arts go beyond our daily efforts to stay alive, they illustrate
very well the dimension of “higher” as opposed to “lower” kinds of functioning
with which the Platonic tradition is concerned. As a powerful form of freedom and
intelligent love, beauty and the arts show how rather than being flatly opposed to the
physical world, freedom and love emerge from within it. And at the same time they
constitute a kind of “thought” and they contribute to the higher reality and “truth.”
Our natural response to the outstanding achievements of every art form and to the
beauty of nature is reverence. (“Beauty alone has this privilege, to be the most clearly

222   N OTES
 visible and the most loved”; Plato, Phaedrus, 250e.) I offer some thoughts about
beauty’s relation to freedom and thought in Chapter 2 (comments on Iris Murdoch)
and in Chapter 7 and its footnotes.
24 “Pragmatism,” as in C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, might be taken
as implying that we should pursue truth not as such but only insofar as it can
make a “practical difference.” Traditional metaphysics suggests that the only way
to determine whether any particular “difference” ought to be taken into account is
through thought, and thus through the pursuit of truth as such, so that if the criterion
of “making a practical difference” is supposed to be different from traditional
metaphysics, it’s either vacuous (because it doesn’t tell us what a “practical” difference
is) or dogmatic.
25 The articles on “Idealism,” for example, in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (article by Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, accessed in December
2015) and in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (article by T. L. S. Sprigge)
(1998) both describe the two basic forms of “idealism” in a way that makes them
correspond to Berkeley’s and Kant’s versions, respectively.
26 See, for example, E. B. Holt et al. (1912), and Maurizio Ferraris (2015).
27 I give a general introduction to Hegel in Chapter 3. For a systematic outline of his
unification of science, art, religion, and philosophy, see my “How Plato and Hegel
Integrate the Sciences, the Arts, Religion, and Philosophy” (forthcoming).
28 Quotes from Emerson, Nature (first published 1836), Chapter VIII, and “The Method
of Nature” (first published 1841), as reprinted in Emerson (2001), pp. 54 and 92.
29 R. G. Collingwood (1924), p. 36.
30 A. N. Whitehead (1929), p. 23.
31 Jonathan Lear (1990), pp. 219–21.
32 Robert M. Wallace (2005). On “true infinity,” see especially Chapter 3. In Chapter 2 of
the present book (footnote 5), I give references to some of the scholars who interpret
Hegel as rejecting “transcendence” in favor of “immanence” and I explain how he is
in fact formulating what I call a “true transcendence.”
33 See note 7 to this chapter for citations.
34 Besides Symposium 210d, I mean Republic 490b (“Once getting near what really is
and having intercourse with it and having begotten understanding and truth, he
knows, truly lives, is nourished. . .”), 519c (“thinking that they had settled while still
alive in the faraway Isles of the Blessed”), 585d (“a more true pleasure”), Symposium
211d (“And there in life . . . there if anywhere should a person live his life beholding
that Beauty”), 212a-b (“The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth
to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it
would be he”), and Timaeus 90c (“To the extent that human nature can partake of
immortality, he can in no way fail to achieve this”). Recent scholarship and reference
works generally seem to shy away from these passages.
35 To name only some of the other prominent writers who have been fed by Plato’s
thinking: Moses Maimonides, Jelaluddin Rumi, St Thomas Aquinas, Meister
Eckhart, Benedict Spinoza, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, F. W. J. Schelling, William Blake, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Emerson, Walt
Whitman, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, C. G. Jung, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner . . . .
More comprehensive historical narratives of Platonism in philosophy can be found

NOTES    223
 in John Findlay (1974), chapter 9; in the three volumes of Terence Irwin (2011); in
Christoph Horn et al., eds. (2009), “Wichtige Stationen der Wirkungsgeschichte,” pp.
387-522; and in Hans Blumenberg (1996). Important parts of the story are examined
by Terence Irwin (1989), Stephen R. L. Clark (2013), Peter Adamson (2014), Algis
Uzdavinys (2008), Lloyd P. Gerson (2005) and (2013), Lloyd P. Gerson, ed. (2011),
Stephen Menn (1998), Carlos Fraenkel (2013), Arbogast Schmitt (2012), Douglas
Hedley and Sarah Hutton, eds. (2008), Iris Murdoch (1993) (on Plato, Schopenhauer,
Wittgenstein), Frederick Beiser (2009) (on aesthetic Platonism in Germany), Andrew
Cole (2014) (on Neoplatonism and Hegel), A. J. Festugiere (1935/1975), Werner
Beierwaltes (1972/2004), Jens Halfwassen (1992, 1999/2005), Arthur Versluis (2014)
(on the Platonism of Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson), Stuart Gerry
Brown (1945), and Jay Bregman (1990). For commentary on important parts of
Platonism’s deep and pretty much uninterrupted influence in literature, see Anna
Baldwin and Sarah Hutton, eds. (1994), and Martha Nussbaum (2003), Part III.

Chapter 2: “That which shows God in me,

fortifies me”, pp. 29–66
1 Emerson, “An Address” (1838); in Emerson (2001), p. 74.
2 St Paul: Acts 17:28. For St Athanasius and others, see the Wikipedia article,
“Divinization [Christian],” citing among many other sources the Catechism of the
Catholic Church; and see Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung, eds. (2007).
This theme in Christian thought is ignored by many writers, including Stanley
Rosen. Citing the intimate connection that Hegel claims to establish between God
and humans, Rosen writes that “it seems evident that [Hegel] cannot be an orthodox
Christian” ([2014], p. 452). But in view of the authoritative Christian literature that I
just mentioned, the evidence that Rosen cites does not establish this.
3 The Essential Rumi (2004), p. 13.
4 Karl Rahner (1978), p. 63.
5 Scholars who think that Hegel rejects transcendence in favor of immanence include J.
N. Findlay (1967), p. 17 (“a conception of radically immanent teleology that is largely
a borrowing from Hegel”); Karl Ameriks, “The Legacy of Idealism in the Philosophy
of Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard” (2000), pp. 259–60, and Kant and the Fate of
Autonomy (2000), pp. 186 (“traditional transcendent notions of . . . divinity”) and
336 (“a separate deity”); Terry Pinkard (2002), p. 303; William Desmond (2003),
p. 2; Frederick Beiser (2005), pp. 44, 143; Stephen Houlgate (2006), p. 435; A. W.
Moore (2012), p. 178; and Ludwig Siep in N. Mooren and M. Quante, eds. (2018),
p. 770 (“immanentistisch”) and p. 772. Of course if by “transcendent” you simply
mean “separate from the world,” then it’s true that Hegel’s God isn’t “transcendent.”
But then you’ve abandoned the word’s etymology (“going beyond,” that is, essentially
surpassing the world) in favor of a notion, separateness, that has no place in
sophisticated theology.
6 See Wallace (2005), chapter 3, for more on this argument in Hegel.
7 Hegel’s God is more “personal” than we are because it’s “supremely free” (HSL p.
841, SuW 6:570, GW 12:251). This ultimate, non-anthropomorphic God loves us,

224   N OTES
 Hegel shows, as “its own self.” (“The universal . . . could also be called free love and
boundless blessedness, for it bears itself towards what is different from it as towards its
own self ” [HSL, p. 603, SuW 6:277, GW 12:35].) In this teaching, Hegel is elaborating
on Plato’s doctrine that the demiurge, the creator, wanted the world “to become as
much like himself as was possible” (Timaeus 29e).
8 A recent author who identifies God with the true Good is Robert M. Adams (1999).
As Adams notes, his book is very Platonic. In Chapters 5–8 I will show how this
identification of God with the true Good works in Plato’s texts.
9 On the famous line in Luke, see Ilaria Ramelli (2009), available online (March 2013).
10 Plotinus, Enneads, V.I.11 (emphasis added). Elsewhere, unfortunately, Plotinus often
contrasts “here,” our present life, with “there,” our life when we return to the One,
thus seeming to suggest that the One is not “here” within us, but somewhere else.
Confusing metaphors!
11 On the continuity between Plato and the so-called “Neoplatonists,” see Lloyd Gerson
(2013) and David J. Yount (2014). Gerson traces a similar continuity between Plato
and Aristotle in his (2005).
12 Augustine, Confessions, III.vi.11, p. 43.
13 We “worship” Spinoza’s “God or Nature” by loving it as the sole complete
precondition of our existence and flourishing, and this worship raises us above our
less intelligent affects such as fear and greed. In this way, Spinoza’s God is “higher.”
We make a vertical “ascent” from (as Spinoza says) bondage to freedom, and this
vertical dimension is analogous to the dimension by which God, for traditional Jews
and Christians, surpasses what’s merely human. This analogy between Spinoza’s
thinking and traditional theism wasn’t recognized by his critics, or by such surveyors
of philosophical theology as Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,
Rousseau in his Emile, and Kant in his Critiques and his other writings. Kant
describes Spinozism and other forms of what he calls “enthusiasm” (Schwärmerei) as
“a concept in which the understanding is simultaneously exhausted and all thinking
itself has an end” (“The End of All Things,” Ak. 8:336)—a description that hardly
does justice to Spinoza’s “intellectual love of God.” However, Spinoza’s thinking differs
from most of the Platonic tradition in reducing valuing to appetitive desiring, and
in failing to give an account of our love of other people. Spinoza privileges theory
over practice and knowledge over action, and he thinks he knows nature (which is to
say, reality as a whole) as egoistic and mechanistic. So, like Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza
preaches what we might call enlightened self-interest, rather than the kind of honesty
or justice that expresses one’s recognition of the inherent value of other people.
Indeed, since as I’ve suggested an egoist is governed by his boundaries vis-à-vis others
and thus isn’t fully self-governed or free, the egoism that Spinoza claims to know to
be true undermines his claim to be presenting a doctrine of liberation. So Kant and
others were right to fear that Spinoza had not identified a basis in reality for the kind
of value or the kind of value-directed human functioning that they cared about. Since
I share Kant’s concern about these issues, I favor Plato’s (and Hegel’s) conception
of ascent, in which we explore value and reality (practice and theory, action and
knowledge) inseparably, over Spinoza’s in which what value there is, is an aftereffect
of an apparently value-free reality. And I likewise favor Plato’s and Hegel’s “God” over
Spinoza’s “God.” But a balanced assessment of Spinoza must acknowledge that unlike,
say, Hobbes, he was in fact trying to present a form of ascent or inner freedom, and
thus a kind of transcendence.

NOTES    225
14 The best studies of Kant’s theology that I know of are Christopher J. Insole (2013) and
(2016), though Insole doesn’t seem to appreciate the full cogency of non-Christian
Platonic theology.
15 My most detailed and comprehensive account of Hegel is Wallace (2005). For more
concentrated and better focused accounts, see Wallace, “How G. W. F. Hegel’s Broadly
Platonic Idealism Explains Knowledge, Value, and Freedom,” forthcoming in B.
Göcke and J. R. Farris, eds., Rethinking Idealism and Immaterialism, and also Wallace
(2018).
16 Emerson (1979), “The Over-Soul,” p. 160. On Emerson’s Platonism, see Stuart Gerry
Brown (1945), Jay Bregman (1990), and chapter 4 of Arthur Versluis (2014).
17 Emerson (1979), pp. 40 and 37.
18 Emerson (1979), p. 161.
19 Robert D. Richardson Jr. (1995), pp. 472–75.
20 William James’s failure to connect with Emerson’s notion of the “self-existing
Supreme Cause” can be seen in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902/1987), p.
36 (in Lecture 2), where he alludes to Emerson’s “worship of mere abstract laws,” p. 58
(in Lecture 3) (“abstract divineness of things”), and p. 461 n. 82 (in Lecture 20) (“only
a medium of communion”).
21 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909/1987), pp. 770–81. It seems that James’s
friend and colleague, Josiah Royce, who espoused a variety of “idealism,” hadn’t been
able to explain this for him either.
22 Heidegger spoke occasionally, in a mythic/prophetic manner, of “a god,” but left it
entirely unclear what this “god” might be or how we might relate to it.
23 A.N. Whitehead (1933), p. 25.
24 A.N. Whitehead (1926/1996), p. 155.
25 Whitehead (1926/1996), pp. 155–60.
26 One not insignificant index of the limitedness of Whitehead’s influence today is the
fact that A. W. Moore’s quite broadly conceived The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics
(2012) contains no discussion of Whitehead. (Nor, unfortunately, of Murdoch or
Polanyi, either.)
27 Whitehead’s admirer Charles Hartshorne doesn’t clarify the role of freedom in
transcendence any more than Whitehead did. Hartshorne describes “process theism”
or “panentheism” as the doctrine of an “eternal-temporal consciousness, knowing and
including the world” ([1953/2000], p. 17). I applaud the non-separateness of God and
world which the view aims to achieve, but I doubt that the best final account of their
relationship is that God “includes” the world (or, as Hartshorne says elsewhere, that
the world is a “constituent” [p. 19] of God). A “constituent” must apparently be real
in the same sense in which that which it helps to constitute is real. In which case, that
which it helps to constitute (namely, God) is limited by its relation to this equally real
thing (the world), and thus is not infinite and not fully self-governing. Hartshorne
accepts the consequence that God is not infinite (p. 436), but regards it as the only
way to secure freedom for humans. But what he secures for us as “freedom” is only
alternative possibilities, not rational self-government. Neither God nor humans, as
Hartshorne describes them, are (fully) rationally self-governing. They are both finite,
each limited by the other. It is not clear that there is anything here that deserves to be
called “transcendence.” Hartshorne doesn’t consider the possibility (which I find in

226   N OTES
 Plato, Plotinus, Hegel, and Emerson) that our freedom or self-government might be
identical to God’s freedom or self-government. This view is not “pantheism,” because
it finds the divine freedom or self-government “in” what is not divine, namely, us.
And neither is it “panentheism,” as defined by Hartshorne, because it denies that we
and God are equally real, one helping to “constitute” the other (and thus also limiting
the other). Hartshorne’s co-editor, William L. Reese, says that he and Hartshorne
found Hegel too ambiguous to grasp in their categories (p. xi). My chapters 2–4 aim
to explain the fairly straightforward proposal that I think Hartshorne and Reese
failed to appreciate in Hegel, and my chapters 5 and 8 aim to identify the makings of
this proposal in Plato.
28 Whitehead’s vindication of religion vis-à-vis science in Whitehead (1926) boils down
to the fact that religion “insists” (p. 143) on the value dimension of reality. Unlike
Plato and Hegel, Whitehead doesn’t point out the rational freedom that value-
discussion has in common with science, or the way in which the pursuit both of
science and of value brings into being a self-governing reality, and thus a reality “as
itself.” Once again, the Platonic notion of a higher degree of reality and the drama of
ascent to it do not come into play.
29 Connecting the Good with reality amounts to wishful thinking: Bertrand Russell
(1918/2004), pp. 5 and 24. And the same view in 1945: Bertrand Russell (1945), p.
126.
30 Bertrand Russell (1918/2004), p. 22.
31 G. E. Moore, “The Refutation of Idealism,” Mind 12 (1903), pp. 433–53: “The trivial
proposition which I propose to dispute is this: esse is percipi” [to be is to be perceived]
(par. 5); Bertrand Russell (1912/1959), p. 14: “Very many philosophers, perhaps a
majority, have held that there is nothing real except minds and their ideas. Such
philosophers are called ‘idealists.’” These are their descriptions of the “idealism,”
represented in their day by Bradley and Bosanquet, which they seek to unseat. You
will note (see especially the Introduction and Chapter 3) that nothing that I say about
rational mysticism in this book depends upon accepting this kind of “idealism.”
32 The numbers indicate Wittgenstein’s numbered paragraphs. The translations are my
own, starting primarily from the Pears/McGuinness translation (1961) but favoring a
somewhat more literal approach.
33 Wittgenstein (1961), October 7, 1916.
34 Wittgenstein (1961), October 8, 1916 (translation slightly revised).
35 A. W. Moore heroically takes Wittgenstein’s doctrine of “nonsense” at face value,
allowing that in a useful sense ethics, aesthetics, and Wittgenstein’s own presentation
of “value,” “God,” and “the mystical” may be “nonsense”—and explaining in
detail why this needn’t prevent them from containing “inexpressible” but genuine
“knowledge” ([1997], pp. 216–18). What seems missing here, as in Wittgenstein
himself, is an appreciation of the straightforward kind of knowledge that results
when we see how science, art, and other ways of rising above natural stimulus-and-
response bring a new kind of reality into the world. Namely, the reality of what
governs itself, through (various kinds of) “reason.”
36 In fact Wittgenstein seems to dismiss inner experience as of interest only to
“psychology” (6.423, “the will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology”).
Presumably he thinks that inner experience is merely an additional set of “facts,”
included in the “world” and not transcending it. But this simply presupposes that our

NOTES    227
 fundamental experience is the registering (describing) of “facts” or “phenomena,”
rather than the drama that Plato and Hegel describe, in which what we’re aware of is
the effort of what we would like to be, to emerge. So that the activity of describing is
fully intelligible to us only as one aspect of this drama that we are.
37 A. W. Moore interprets Wittgenstein’s gnomic remarks about “good or bad willing”
changing the world only through the world’s “waxing or waning as a whole” (6.43)
as alluding to an issue of “wholeness, autonomy, integrity, being at one with the
world” (Moore [2001], p. 194; compare Moore [2012], p. 252). This may be a correct
interpretation, but Wittgenstein is hardly helpful on the subject of wholeness,
autonomy, or integrity. On a topic on which others whom he doesn’t name (Plato,
Kant, Hegel) have written many analytical pages, Wittgenstein offers us only a single
uninterpreted metaphor.
38 Later, Wittgenstein also read Tolstoy, William James, Kierkegaard, and Angelus
Silesius. See B. F. McGuinness (1966). On Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein,
see Iris Murdoch (1992), chapters 1–3, Bryan Magee (1997), chapter 14, and A.W.
Moore (2001), p. 226. Wittgenstein gives no sign of having read Plato, Kant, or Hegel
with the degree of interest with which he had initially read Schopenhauer.
39 “Statements of value . . . are simply expressions of emotion”: Ayer (1946, n.d.), p. 103.
Ayer stated in his Preface (p. 31) that his “views . . . derive from the doctrines of Bertrand
Russell and Wittgenstein.”
40 Ayer’s discussion of “mystical intuition” on pp. 118–19 of Ayer (1946) makes no
reference to Wittgenstein’s account of “the mystical” in the Tractatus.
41 Martin Heidegger “demonized” science quite literally: the spiritual “enfeeblement”
([1953/1961], p. 37) produced by “the onslaught of what we call the demonic” (p. 38) is
exemplified by science (pp. 39–40). And he was systematically anti-Platonic: In Plato,
“the vision makes the thing. Now this vision becomes decisive, instead of the thing
itself ” (p. 153). Heidegger didn’t notice how the thing’s own “vision” (the idea) enables
it to be “itself,” by pursuing the Good rather than being determined by its heritage
and environment; nor did he notice how the activity of modern science does the same
thing, insofar as it enables us to be guided by truth rather than by mere opinion.
42 Findlay describes the first volume and a half of his two volumes as articulating “a
conception of radically immanent teleology that is largely a borrowing from Hegel”
([1967], p.17). See also Findlay (1967), p. 197: “Whereas for Hegel the alienation in
question is exclusively a this-world affair, on our view it covers another world or worlds as
much as our own”; and the title of Findlay (1967) Chapter 6: “Other-worldly Geography.”
43 HSL p. 145 (translation revised); GW 21:133; SuW 5:160.
44 As Plato says, “The lover is turned toward the great sea of beauty” (Symposium 210d).
Regarding the role of art in unification through love, Plato is famously critical of the
arts in Republic books ii, iii, and x. But he is also well aware that he himself is an artist
(Socrates at Republic 488a: “How greedy for images I am”). Plato is critical of the arts
and of popular religion because he wants to purify them, and he wants to purify them
because he sees that they contain an important germ of truth, or of the unification that
Murdoch speaks of here. Hegel, for his part, brings art and divinity together (via religion
and philosophy) in a similar way under the rubric of “Absolute Spirit” in his Encyclopedia
of the Philosophical Sciences. I explain this Hegelian unification in Wallace (2018).
45 Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in his (1963), p. 4.
46 Wilfrid Sellars, op. cit., p. 40.

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47 Wilfrid Sellars (1997), p. 45. With the mock-French title, Meditations Hegeliennes,
Sellars is alluding to Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, in which Husserl
explored themes that he took to be Cartesian. So Sellars is suggesting that his own
essay has an important affinity with Hegel.
48 This is Kant’s problem, which he addresses in the “Schematism” section of the
Critique of Pure Reason, of how pure concepts or categories, such as causality and
substance, can apply to the material that we’re “given” by sensation. On how Salomon
Maimon brought out this problem for Kant, in a way that suggests the inadequacy of
mere “schematism” as a solution, see Frederick C. Beiser (1987), pp. 285–99.
49 For an explanation of Hegel’s contrast between what’s “concrete” and what’s “abstract,”
together with his notion of the “concrete universal,” see Wallace (2005) pp. 228–30.
50 McDowell argues in this essay that rather than “arguing that there can be self-
conscious individuals only in mutually recognitive communities,” Hegel “makes the
attempt to disavow dependence on what is in fact one’s own life vivid with the image
of trying to end the life of the other that confronts one” ([2009], pp. 154, 162). In
Wallace (2005), I came to a similar conclusion that “Hegel’s argument for mutual
recognition does not make anything a ‘social construct’” (p. 289). Robert Brandom
had asserted (and in this he has been followed by Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard)
that “to be a self . . . is to be taken or treated as one by those one takes or treats
as one; to be recognized by those one recognizes” ([2002], pp. 216–17). I replied
that “what freedom requires, according to the ‘recognition’ argument in [Hegel’s
Encyclopedia’s] Philosophy of Spirit, is not membership in a mutual-recognition club,
but willingness to accept objectively-qualified others into the club that one wants to
belong to, objectively, oneself ” (Wallace [2005], p. 289). An interpretation of Hegel
that resembles mine has now been argued with much greater textual detail by Jens
Rometsch (2017). To Brandom’s social constructivism, McDowell replied that “if
self-legislation of rational norms is not to be a random leap in the dark, it must be
seen as an acknowledgement of an authority that the norms have anyway. . . . What
controls one’s life is still in oneself, in whatever it is about one that enables one to
recognize that the norms are authoritative. But their authority is not a creature of
one’s recognition” ([2009] p. 105; see his more detailed responses to Pippin’s social
constructivism, pp. 166–184 and 185–203). I obviously agree with McDowell in
objecting to random leaps in the dark. See also Sebastian Rödl (2007), pp. 114–20.
51 HSL pp. 145–146 (emphasis added by Miller; translation revised by myself, because
Miller didn’t catch the reflexive aspect of “Hinausgehen über sich”); GW 21:133; SuW
5:160.
52 Wolfram Gobsch gives a detailed and illuminating account of the difference between
John McDowell and Hegel in his (2017).
53 For more on this ascent to infinity or “reality” in Hegel see Wallace (2005), Chapter
3; Wallace (2018); and Wallace (forthcoming). For extensive discussions of the
“transformation” of animal nature into rational nature, see Andrea Kern and
Christian Kietzmann, eds. (2017).
54 Deriving thought’s categories from its dealings with time, Rödl’s CT overcomes
the divorce between forms of intuition and forms of thought, by which Kant
unintentionally allowed room for metaphysical skepticism (CT p. 42). In this
solution, Rödl in effect follows Salomon Maimon (Beiser [1987], pp. 300–1) and
Hegel (Encyclopedia, part 2, on space and time).

NOTES    229
55 According to Irad Kimhi, who is opposing the main twentieth-century tradition
in philosophical logic (Frege, Russell, Quine), “The various capacities which
philosophical logic finds itself called upon to elucidate—capacities for judgment, for
language, for the deployment of logical words. . . and for self-consciousness. . .—are
all one and the same capacity” ([2018], p. 16, emphasis added). Self-consciousness
is this capacity because “the impossibility of thinking contradictory judgments
together is a matter of the self-consciousness of the together” (p. 53.) (There is no
“I” in something that “thinks” contradictory judgments “together.”) As for logical
words, “Conjunction is essential to the act of bringing several judgments together in
one consciousness. This act cannot be expressed by a mere list of assertions one after
another—for each item on the list might belong to a different state of consciousness”
(p. 58). And “negation is essential to the act of identifying ourselves as disagreeing
with a judgment” (p. 58). Finally, language is essential to logic insofar as language
expresses the self-conscious commitments and disagreements that are the business of
logical words. Frege’s “linguistic turn” is “partial and incomplete,” insofar as he allows
for intellects that could be engaged with content without “thinking thinking” (p. 64),
that is, without self-consciousness. Whereas Kant correctly, in Kimhi’s view, finds this
“notion of activity . . . incoherent: a form of intellectual activity separate from self-
consciousness of the activity” (p. 64). But if logic, language, and self-consciousness
are all the same capacity, then the Frege-Russell-Quine effort to expel the self and
so-called “psychologism” from logic and science is futile, and we must consider the
possibility that the self is as real as or more real than anything else. Kimhi refers to
this result as “the unity of thinking and being” (Kimhi [2018], p. 28).
56 Another very helpful essay that Rödl published in 2017 on the identity of rational
spontaneity and material substance (or on what I call the material world’s
transcending itself) is his “Selbsterkenntnis des Selbstbewegers” (2017).
57 As Hegel confirms with his comment at HSL 138; GW 21:125; SuW 5:150 on infinity
as the advent of “freedom.”
58 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855/1976), sections 48–50.

Chapter 3: Freedom and full

reality, pp. 67–86
1 Stephen Theron draws attention to John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development
of Christian Doctrine (1845), as showing that doctrine and “orthodoxy” need not be
viewed as beyond development. See Theron (2014), pp. 10, 292, 337. He acknowledges
that because “development” itself is developing, Newman’s view isn’t yet widely
recognized as “orthodox.”
2 Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik L1 (Akad. 28:268), as quoted by Christopher J. Insole
(2013), p. 75.
3 Beiser (1987) gives a vivid account of the intellectual and cultural situation in
Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, to which Hegel responded.
4 The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 302.
5 HSL p. 603, SuW 6:277, GW 12: 35.

230   N OTES
 6 Ludwig Feuerbach (1957, originally published 1854), p. 78.
7 Ludwig Feuerbach (1957), p. 86 (emphasis added).
8 Ludwig Feuerbach, “Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy” (1842), in
Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 166; emphasis added.
9 The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 168.
10 Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity (1843), in The
Fiery Brook (1972), p. 252; emphasis in the original.
11 John Edward Toews (1980), pp. 175–99, describes the biographical and historical
context of Feuerbach’s proclivity for dualism.
12 On Hegel’s account of “contradiction” and how it relates to his ethics and theology,
see Wallace (2005), chapter 4 on “contradiction” and chapters 3–6 on ethics and
theology.
13 The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 301.
14 It’s true, of course, that some people who have been described as “mystics” show little
interest in reason. But the primary meaning of mysticism is not a rejection of reason,
but the direct or immediate knowing of God.
15 On this recurring pattern see Cohn (1957/1970).
16 Hegel, LPWH (1975), pp. 198–206.
17 Hegel, LPWH (1975), p. 197.
18 Hegel, LPWH (1975), p. 67.
19 For a detailed account of Absolute Spirit, see my “How Plato and Hegel Integrate
the Sciences, the Arts, Religion, and Philosophy” (forthcoming). When Hegel wrote
in his Philosophy of Right, §258R, that “the state consists in the march of God in the
world,” he immediately went on to explain that “in considering the Idea of the state,
we must not have any particular states or particular institutions in mind; instead, we
should consider the Idea, this actual God, in its own right.” And this “Idea,” as I have
said, is only explained in his Science of Logic.
20 From what I’ve said it should be clear that contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s widely
read essay, “The End of History?” (1989), Hegel has no truck with any idea of an
“end of history” that could take place within time. In ascribing this idea to Hegel,
Fukuyama didn’t and couldn’t cite Hegel’s texts. An illuminating discussion of the
whole Fukuyama episode is provided by Philip T. Grier in Jon Stewart, ed. (1996), pp.
183–98.
21 The best-known promoter of a “non-metaphysical Hegel” was Klaus Hartmann
(1972).
22 Terry Pinkard (2012), p. 18.
23 Lloyd Gerson (2013), p. 10.
24 Pippin (2018), p. 9. William F. Bristow draws a similar contrast between Platonism
and “subjectivity” in his (2007), pp. 113–14.
25 Plato in fact presents in book x of his Laws an influential “cosmological argument” for
God as a self-moving first mover. “The motion which can generate itself is infinitely
superior” (894d). This discussion makes no direct reference to humans. But I will
suggest in Chapter 8 that Plato’s strongest argument for the reality of a self-mover is
in fact his account of human rational freedom in the Republic and elsewhere.

NOTES    231
26 Bertrand Russell (1912), chapter 1: “Very many philosophers, perhaps a majority,
have held that there is nothing real except minds and their ideas. Such philosophers
are called ‘idealists.’” More recently, Miles Burnyeat (“Idealism and Greek
Philosophy” [1982]) assumed that “idealism” is essentially Berkeley’s view.
27 Actually, setting “God” on one side, doctrines that resemble Berkeley’s were proposed
by John Stuart Mill and Ernst Mach in the nineteenth century and by Bertrand
Russell himself and A. J. Ayer in the twentieth century (“phenomenalism”). The
relation between ideas and physical reality is a difficult issue, and Berkeley’s solution
to it is as plausible as some of the other leading proposals.
28 Kant doesn’t say in so many words that the mind “imposes” key features on the
world, but an alternative formulation is hard to find, and Kant’s letter to Markus
Herz of February 2, 1772 (cited by Robert Pippin [2018], p. 12 n. 17), invites such an
interpretation.
29 Socrates says in his defense speech at his trial, as reported by Plato, that “the
unexamined life is not worth living for men” (Apology 38a). Plato elaborates
this thought into a theory of our inner freedom or self-government (“becoming
entirely one,” Republic 443d), which is evidently central to what he elsewhere
calls “becoming like God” (Theaetetus 176b). That this is the world’s fullest reality
we can see from the Timaeus, in which the divine craftsman sought to make the
world “as much like himself as was possible” (Timaeus 29e), and the design of
human beings, in particular, is the main theme of the remainder of the dialogue. I
develop this account of Plato in Chapters 5–8. Hegel’s parallel thought is developed
throughout his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, as I explain in Wallace
(2005).
30 George Santayana (1967), p. 63. Similar complaints have been registered by many
“new realists,” from 1912 (E.B. Holt et al., The New Realism) to 2015 (Maurizio
Ferraris, Introduction to the New Realism).
31 Thomas Nagel writes that “a religious solution gives us a borrowed centrality
through the concern of a supreme being” ([1986], p. 210). Nagel doesn’t envisage the
possibility that Plato and Hegel propose, that we are “central” insofar as we participate
in the supreme being.
32 F. H. Bradley maintained in his Appearance and Reality (1893) that “our experience,
where relational, is not true” (p. 29). (Compare p. 322: “To be defined from without
is, in principle, to be distracted within.”) His thesis appears to depend on the
Hegelian notion that I’m presenting, that what succeeds in being itself is more real “as
itself,” and in that sense is more real, period, and more “true.” Unfortunately, Bradley
didn’t explore the way we experience being real as ourselves, by thinking rather than
being merely reactive about what to do and what to believe. Consequently, he didn’t
link his thesis about “relations” to the Platonic process of “ascent” or its Hegelian
equivalent. The widespread failure to make this linkage clear was a major factor in the
confusions that have prevailed about “idealism” in the twentieth century and down to
the present.
33 On the Genealogy of Morality, third treatise, section 25.
34 The Essential Rumi (2004), p. 123.
35 This is the gist of Hegel’s refutation of “rational egoism” in his HSL (1812/1814) and
his Encyclopedia (1817ff.) (see Wallace [2005], pp. 126–40, 260–65, and 319–20). For
Plato’s version of the same argument, see Chapters 7 and 8.

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36 One problem with much discussion of causation is that people often assume that
genuine causes must be “physical.” This would imply that when we say that we
believe something because we have good reasons for believing it, this is not a “causal”
explanation. But this seems arbitrary. See S. Goetz and C. Taliaferro (2011), chs. 6
and 7, and Rödl (2007), passim.
37 Interesting questions about our capacity for rational self-guidance have been raised
by Benjamin Libet’s well-known experiments about the relationship in time between
electrical “readiness potential” in the brain and subjects’ awareness of making
a decision. There seems to be no good reason to think that Libet’s experiments
demonstrate that we aren’t capable at all of rational self-guidance. They do suggest,
which should be no surprise, that much of our mental processing is unconscious. But
it doesn’t follow from this that our actual decisions aren’t conscious. For a detailed
critique of Libet’s interpretation of his experiments, see Alfred Mele (2009), Chapters
3 and 4. It would be quite unfortunate if Libet’s experiments did demonstrate what he
thinks they do, since this would imply that we aren’t capable of conscious reasoning
about whether they do this.

Chapter 4: Full reality is God, pp. 87–104

1 Plato suggests this (as I’ll explain in Chapters 5–8) through his account of the “soul”
and “intellect” in his Republic, Phaedrus, and Timaeus, and his account of immortality
in his Symposium.
2 Plotinus, Enneads, V.I.11. It is certainly the case that Plato normally speaks of the
“demiurge” or “intellect” or “the Good” as though it were a separate being from the
world. This is because he is telling only a “likely story” (as he says in the Timaeus
[29d]) or giving us a preliminary sketch (as he says in the Republic [435d]). But I
will show in Chapter 8 that the connection between humans and God which Plato
envisages (the philosopher “becomes like God” [Theaetetus 176b] by caring for
his “divine part” [Timaeus 90a], and God in his turn cannot be “jealous” but must
create a world [Timaeus 29e-30a]) can reasonably be summed up in an image like
Plotinus’s.
3 The Essential Rumi (2004), p. 13.
4 The response to “doubt”—suggesting that doubt itself helps to constitute God—that
I’ve given in this section is articulated by Hegel in his Science of Logic, as I explain
in Wallace (2005), pp. 109–16. Plato seems to suggest the same response when he
describes Socrates as lacking knowledge of the Good, but continuing to seek it
(Republic 506c), and goes on to describe the (seeking) philosopher as becoming like
God (Theaetetus 176a, Symposium 212b).
5 In remarks like this one in his Opus postumum (which is a manuscript that he left at
his death), Kant appears to abandon the unstable solution to the problem of divine
creation and human freedom which he had presented in his major published works of
the 1780s and 1790s. For a detailed account of the unfolding of Kant’s thought on these
issues, see Insole (2013), and for an overview see Insole (2016).
6 Richard Dawkins (2006), p. 31.
7 C. S. Lewis (2001), p. 37.

NOTES    233
 8 Hegel’s whole system is concerned with the issue of being self-governing by being
guided by something higher; and this higher guide plays the same role, in Hegel’s
thinking, that the Good plays in Plato. Indeed, it appears under the name of the
“Good” in the final section of Hegel’s Science of Logic, on the “Absolute Idea.” For a
detailed account of how “ascent” to higher standards structures Hegel’s metaphysics
and theology, from “true infinity” to “absolute Spirit,” see Wallace (2005), Chapters
3–6. Bertrand Russell misread Hegel in the same way that Lewis did: “In Hegel
. . . not only evil, but good also, is regarded as illusory” ([2004], p. 8). Russell and
Lewis were probably misled by the ostensibly Hegelian F. H. Bradley, who wrote
that “goodness is a subordinate and, therefore, a self-contradictory aspect of the
universe” ([1893], p. 371; on his relation to Hegel see p. 318 n.1). Bradley didn’t
notice how, in Hegel as in Plato, the finite becomes more “real” precisely by being
guided by a higher standard, or how that standard finally appears in Hegel’s Logic as
the “Good,” itself.
9 Lewis (2001), pp. 26–27.
10 Fritjof Capra (1977); Fred Alan Wolf (1996); Deepak Chopra (1996); “What the
‘Bleep’ Do We Know?” (film, 2004).
11 Chapter 25 of The Daodejing (2001), p. 175. I’ve altered the translation of the final
word, following the translators’ “Important Terms,” p. 394.
12 In his classic study, Natural Supernaturalism. Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (1971), M. H. Abrams takes it that the Romantic poets’ “natural
supernaturalism” (p. 68) breaks with the outright supernaturalism and outright
transcendence that were postulated by premodern theology (“displacement from
a supernatural to a natural frame of reference” [p. 13]). My thesis in this book is
that sophisticated premodern religious thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine
located God “within us” and thus within nature as well as “beyond us” and beyond
nature, so that the Romantics’ “natural supernaturalism” in fact continued, rather than
breaking with, the most sophisticated premodern tradition (the one that understood
what true transcendence must be like).
13 I should add that some institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church impart
a sophisticated Augustinian philosophical theology, and thus a conception of
transcendence that doesn’t make it in principle “separate,” to their more intellectually
inclined members.
14 My disagreement with Charles Taylor about God, “belief,” and “transcendence” or
“immanence” begins with his stimulating book, Hegel (1975), in which I think he
failed to understand Hegel’s critique, in his Science of Logic, of the conventional
conception of transcendence (which Hegel calls the “spurious infinity”). I explain
Hegel’s critique of the conventional conception of transcendence, and I discuss
Taylor’s interpretation of Hegel, in Chapter 3 of Wallace (2005).
15 As in Thomas Nagel’s Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (2009) and
Michael B. Gill’s The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular
Ethics (2011).
16 This discussion began with Aldous Huxley (1945) and (1954), and includes R. C.
Zaehner (1957) (much of which is a critique of Huxley), Steven T. Katz, ed. (1978),
Robert K. C. Forman, ed. (1990), Robert K. C. Forman (1999), Jerome Gellman
(2001), and Jerome Gellmann, “Mysticism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
online 2010.

234   N OTES
17 Unfortunately, Huxley set himself up for the critique that Zaehner and Katz directed
at him because he placed great weight on the extraordinary experiences of a relatively
small number of people who have subjected themselves to extreme mental and
moral discipline. So Zaehner and Katz could reasonably ask, Why has this discipline
apparently produced quite different results in different cultures? Huxley wasn’t aware
of the argument for a mystical higher reality which Plato and Hegel based on more
“ordinary” experiences.
18 Zaehner (1957) stresses this issue of the difference between monistic and theistic
mystical experiences.

Chapter 5: Plato’s progress, pp. 105–134

1 There is ongoing scholarly disagreement about the respective roles of politics and
religious issues in Socrates’s trial and conviction. (See Thomas C. Brickhouse and
Nicholas D. Smith [2002].) The accusers’ allegations were religious, not political.
But it seems safe to say that many of the jurors must have been aware, from long
observation and gossip, that a significant number of Socrates’s associates were not
supporters of Athens’s democracy. And it’s all but certain that a large majority of the
jury in the trial identified with the democratic side.
2 F. Nietzsche (1967), p. 519. “Ressentiment,” French for “resentment,” connotes a
seeking for revenge.
3 In his Treatise (1978), David Hume objects to the doctrine that “every rational
creature is obliged . . . to regulate his actions by reason” (p. 413), maintaining on
the contrary that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (p. 415). Hume
doesn’t explain where the authority of this “ought only to be” comes from. Friedrich
Nietzsche, in his Zarathustra (1883–85), probably has both Christianity and
Platonism in mind in his highly critical sections “On the Afterworldly” and “On the
Despisers of the Body.” We can see from these sections that Nietzsche assumes that
“pure spirit and the good as such” (whose invention by Plato he laments in his Beyond
Good and Evil [1966], p. 2) will “despise” the body and its desires. A similar view of
Plato is promoted by Russell (1945); by Martha Nussbaum (1986), Chapters 5 and 6
on Plato; and by Simon Blackburn (2007). A different view is represented by Terence
Irwin (1989), pp. 114–15; Richard Kraut, in his Introduction to Kraut, ed. (1992), pp.
9–10; and Lloyd Gerson (2003). Irwin and Kraut suggest that the mature Plato is not
“other-worldly.” Gerson defends the Phaedo, together with the dialogues that follow
it, as presenting not an antagonistic dualism but a radical argument to the effect that
the human body is less real than the soul. “The fundamental contrast for Plato is
between the ideal disembodied person or self we strive to become and its embodied
image” (p. 9), where an “image,” for Plato, is less real than what it’s an image of. I will
develop a thought similar to Gerson’s.
4 It has long been common to describe Plato’s metaphysics as a “two-world” view, in
which one world is that of the Forms and the other is that of bodies and sensation.
I find this traditional label quite unfortunate, because it suggests that these “two
worlds” are in some important way equal. They are both described as “worlds.”
Whereas the gist of what I think Plato wants to say about them is precisely that

NOTES    235
 they’re not equal, because only the world of the Forms is fully “real.” The “body” or
the senses may present distractions, but they don’t constitute a separate “world,” and
we don’t need to go to another place to find the truth.
5 Gerson (2003), p. 57, underscores the positive nature of this passage.
6 I’m using the phrase “parts of the soul” loosely here, because it’s widely used to
refer to what Plato discusses in Republic book iv. In fact I sympathize with Jennifer
Whiting’s argument that Plato doesn’t intend here to present a doctrine about the
make-up of “the soul” as such, but only to describe the condition into which a soul
can fall if it doesn’t operate in an ideal way (“Psychic Contingency in the Republic”
[2012]).
7 David Hume (1978), p. 415.
8 Skinner wrote that “the disputing of values is not only possible, it is interminable.
To escape from it we must get outside the system. . . . When we can design small
social interactions and, possibly, whole cultures with the confidence we bring to
physical technology, the question of value will not be raised” (Daedalus [1961], pp.
535–36, 545). To which one can only reply that while Skinner himself might not
raise it, others may have more inquiring minds than his. In contrast to Socrates
(Plato, Apology of Socrates, 38a), Skinner in this essay was, in effect, an apostle of the
“unexamined life.”
9 See previous note.
10 A. J. Ayer ([1935/1946], p. 103) dramatically asserted that “in so far as statements of
value . . . are not scientific, they are not in the literal sense significant, but are simply
expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false.” Platonists, in response,
point out that we appear to be able to think in a disciplined way about what’s really
good. I’ll discuss Plato’s account of this process in a bit more detail in the next
chapter. For a nuanced defense of the idea that what’s good could be a fact like other
facts, see Thomas M. Scanlon (2016).
11 Republic 515d: “things that are more” (mallon onta); Republic 585c: “this is more”
(mallon einai); Timaeus 28a: “It . . . never really is” (ontos de oudepote on); Republic
478d: “what purely is (tou eilikrinos ontos).” Further references can be found in
Gregory Vlastos (1973 and 1981), pp. 43–44.
12 Plato doesn’t explicitly describe the soul’s “being itself ” as making the soul more
“real.” But in the Phaedo he describes the soul and the Forms as “kin” (79d) and
“like” one another (80b). In the original passage that we looked at, he associates the
soul’s being “by itself ” (65d) with the Forms’ becoming clear to it (65–66). And the
conclusion of the Phaedo as a whole is, of course, that the soul is probably immortal,
just as the Forms are. Thus we can probably safely suppose that one way in which the
soul ideally approaches the Forms and fulfills its kinship with them is by becoming,
like the Forms, more real than soulless bodies are.
13 You might ask whether the reality of this “Form” needs to be “separate” from the
reality of the human being that’s seeking to be guided by it. This issue has led to a
great spilling of ink between Platonists, Aristotelians, and others. My suggestion
would be that the Form needs to be “separate” in the sense that it needs to have a
rational authority that we can’t find in what we receive through our sense organs
or our heredity. For the purposes of the present book, it’s enough to say that we all
accept this authority in practice, insofar as we engage in discussion of questions
of truth and value. As Plato says, “Everyone wants the things that really are good”

236   N OTES
 (Republic 505d). Whatever despair we may sometimes express about determining
what these really good things are, it’s highly unlikely that B. F. Skinner or anyone else
has been able to refrain from having such discussions with himself and his intimates
when they were faced with major life decisions.
14 Lloyd Gerson points out that Plato’s account of persons describes personhood as an
accomplishment, rather than just a given (Gerson [2003], pp. 3, 113). Plato’s student,
Aristotle captures something like this in his account of “actuality” or “actualization”
(energeia) as the fullest reality.
15 Influential recent commentators have criticized what they call Vlastos’s “two worlds”
interpretation of Plato in these papers (see G. Fine, “Knowledge and Belief in
Republic V” [1978] and “Knowledge and Belief in Republic V-VII” [1990/1999], and
P. Adamson (2014), ch. 22; and compare Irwin (1995), pp. 266–69). Gail Fine defines
a “Two Worlds” interpretation of Plato as one according to which “knowledge”
(episteme) can only be of Forms, and “belief ” (doxa) can only be of objects of
sensation. She suggests that a more plausible account of the key passage about
knowledge and belief in Republic v (473c-480a) would take Plato to be distinguishing
knowledge and belief as different ways of relating to propositions, rather than as ways
of relating to different objects in the world. My suggestion that Plato is thinking of
how the soul both is and is not (inasmuch as it sometimes pursues the Good and
sometimes doesn’t) explains why Plato would be particularly concerned about the
category of objects that both are and are not. This category includes us, as we usually
conceive of ourselves. F. J. Gonzalez, “Propositions or Objects?” (1996), argues that
Fine’s interpretation can’t make sense of Plato’s text because it leaves belief with no
distinctive domain “over” which it is “set” (pp. 264–68, referring to 477a9). On Fine’s
interpretation, belief applies to propositions just as knowledge applies to (some of
the same) propositions. (On Fine’s interpretation, see also Lloyd Gerson [2003], pp.
161–66.) Fine is right to prefer the thought that the objects of sense are in some way
identical to the objects of intellect. But she is mistaken if she thinks that this means
we can ignore Plato’s suggestion that the objects of intellect are “more real” than the
objects of sense. They are more real insofar as we (and along with us, the rest of the
world of the senses) only sometimes live up to them and thus achieve full reality or
identity as ourselves. This is the complexity of “being identical to.”
16 Thus rather than being “other-worldly,” in the sense of postulating a separate
“world” from this one, Plato postulates a scale of increasing reality in this “world.”
So when Plato has Socrates say that “a man should make all haste to escape from
earth to heaven” (Theaetetus 176a-b), we should understand this as hyperbole—as
indeed what follows makes pretty clear: “And escape means becoming as like God
as possible; and a man becomes like God when he becomes just and pure, with
understanding.”
17 Plato’s Sophist suggests that he was reconsidering the sharp line that he had drawn in
the Republic between what fully “is” and what has “change, life, soul, and intelligence”
(248e). Stephen Menn ([1995], p. 70 n. 2) suggests that Plato, here, wants to get his
earlier self “to admit that the human realities are also realities alongside the divine
ones.” One wonders whether Menn thinks that the later Plato assigns no more
“reality” to Forms than to their images. It seems to me that in order to retain what
drives both his notion of Forms and his recognition in the Sophist that there can be
no sharp dividing line between the divine and the human, Plato needs to think of
the relation between the universal and the particular in the way that Hegel does, as a

NOTES    237
 unity in difference, or a “concrete universal” (on which see Wallace [2005], p. 229). In
this conception, the universal or Form is different from its particular instantiations,
but not separable from them. Plotinus has a conception similar to this when he
locates intellect and God “within us” but still beyond our “momentary acts” (Enneads
VI.I.11). These conceptions preserve the higher authority and in that sense the fuller
reality of the divine, without separating it entirely from the “change, life, soul, and
intelligence” that concern the speaker in the Sophist.
18 J. N. Findlay (1974), pp. 3, 412.
19 Lloyd Gerson (2003), p. 281.
20 Bertrand Russell (2004), p. 15.
21 Martha Nussbaum (1986/2001), p. 161. Nussbaum goes on to say that Nietzsche’s
“insight” doesn’t do justice to the “complexity” of Plato’s arguments. She doesn’t make
it clear whether those arguments would succeed without the alleged ressentiment.
22 Martha Nussbaum (2003), p. 494, n. 16.
23 On Hegel’s doctrine that “substance is essentially subject” (Phenomenology of Spirit,
Miller trans., §25; SuW 3:28), see Wallace (2005), pp. 88–90 and 224–28.
24 Eric Perl (2007), p. 8.
25 Chapter 2 of Schindler (2008) surveys numerous attempts to explain the relation
that Plato is driving at between goodness and truth. Unlike Schindler and the other
commentators he surveys, I rely on Plato’s account in Republic books iv-vii of how the
pursuit of goodness produces unity (443e), and thus (one might say) full reality or
“truth,” in the soul.
26 “Sense-data” theories: Bertrand Russell (1912/1997); A.J. Ayer (1956). Criticisms: W.
V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1953), Wilfrid Sellars (1956/1997), John
McDowell (1994), and Sebastian Rödl (2012). Hegel had given a similar critique, in
the first chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807/1977), in response to Immanuel
Kant’s dualism of “intuition” and “concept” in his CPuR (1781/1787).The critique of
empiricism that Hegel, Quine, Sellars, McDowell, and Rödl carry out makes Plato’s
emphasis on intellect as opposed to sensation as our access to the one real world
seem quite reasonable. Everything that we can speak of is intelligible, so our access to
it is through intellect; and its intelligibility (the Forms) is in it, in some fashion.
27 For further illumination of Plato’s distinctive account of knowledge, see Lloyd
Gerson (2003) and (2013). I suspect that the notion of a faculty of anamnesis, or
“recollection,” which Plato introduces (Meno 81-86, Phaedo 72-76) as a means by
which we could gain access to the Forms (which we might have known directly
before we were born), is also, in effect, directed at who or what we ourselves really are
when we’re distinguished from what our embodied experience has made us.
28 Hans Blumenberg, “An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance
of Rhetoric” (1987), p. 431/“Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der
Rhetorik,” in his (1981), p. 107.
29 Blumenberg, “Anthropological Approach,” p. 429/”Anthropologische Annäherung,”
104.
30 Blumenberg, “Anthropological Approach,” pp. 432, 455/“Anthropologische
Annäherung,” pp. 107, 133.
31 “Ur-Platonism,” again, is Lloyd Gerson’s coinage in his (2013), p. 10.

238   N OTES
32 This Parmenides fragment, which has been translated in very different ways, is listed
as Fragment 3 in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, eds. (1969), p. 269.
33 The separation of “ought” from “is” is a characteristic feature both of empiricism
(see David Hume [1978], pp. 468–69) and of Kantian thinking. I will say some more
about the contrasting “teleological” view of life and reality, for which “ought” and “is”
are intimately entwined, in Chapter 8. I discuss Hegel’s version of this entwinement,
which is most evident in his account of the “ought” and the infinite, in chapter 3 of
Wallace (2005), and in “How G. W. F. Hegel’s Broadly Platonic Idealism Explains
Knowledge, Value, and Freedom” (forthcoming).
34 Such comprehensive accounts of education in Plato as Robert E. Cushman (1958),
and Rashana Kamtekar, “Plato on Education and Art” (in Gail Fine, ed. [2011]),
unfortunately don’t consider “birth in beauty” and midwifery as suggesting an
alternative account of how the necessary “turning” can take place.
35 I’ll discuss Plato’s quite inegalitarian political suggestions in the next chapter. The
process of facilitating the emergence of free selfhood clearly needn’t take place
exclusively or even primarily in schools. Besides Socrates, Plato, Rousseau, and John
Dewey, some recent advocates of education as facilitating the emergence of free
selfhood are A. S. Neill, Paulo Freire, John Holt, and Ivan Illich.

Chapter 6: Plato, freedom, and us,

pp. 135–156
1 The Cave allegory actually has four phases, which are further illuminated by the
parallel stages of the Line and the Sun, which precede the Cave. I don’t have space to go
into these important details.
2 On the continuity between Plato’s and Aristotle’s ethics, see Terence Irwin (1989),
chapter 7, and Lloyd Gerson (2005), chapter 8.
3 Carlos Fraenkel (2013), p. 295.
4 For the “voluntarist” theory of freedom which I mention here, see Thomas Reid (1788)
and Immanuel Kant, CPuR (1781). For the “empiricist” theory of freedom (also known
as the “compatibilist” theory) see Thomas Hobbes (1651), chapter 21, paragraphs 1–4,
and David Hume (1978), Part III, sections 1 and 2, and (1902), pp. 80–103. Versions
of these theories that have been developed by twentieth-century philosophers can be
found in Gary Watson, ed. (1982). I discuss these theories in more detail in Wallace
(2005), pp. 22–27 and 82. Twentieth-century philosophers whose thinking about
freedom resembles Plato’s and Hegel’s “rationalism” or “idealism,” rather than either
voluntarism or empiricist compatibilism, include Gary Watson and Charles Taylor
(whose central papers are reprinted in Watson’s [1982]) and Susan Wolf (1990).
5 I mentioned in the previous note that in recent decades, several important Anglo-
American philosophers (Watson, Taylor, Wolf) have advocated conceptions of
individual freedom and responsibility that resemble Plato’s conception. However,
the implications of their work don’t seem to have received much attention from (for
example) psychologists or other social scientists, who are some of the people to whose
work it should be especially relevant.

NOTES    239
 6 Karl Popper (1945); Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in his (1969).
7 I explain Hegel’s conception of freedom in detail in Wallace (2005). For an
explanation of Hegel’s conception of the “state”—which has been misinterpreted by
Popper and others as having a “totalitarian” character—see Allen Wood’s “Editor’s
Introduction” to G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991), and
Robert M. Wallace (1999).
8 John Bussanich (1999) gives a good discussion of these insufficiently discussed
features of Socrates’s behavior.
9 Though in the same passage in Republic book x where Plato’s Socrates speaks of the
“ancient quarrel between [poetry] and philosophy,” he also says that “if the poetry
that aims at pleasure and imitation has any argument to bring forward that proves it
ought to have a place in a well-governed city, we at least would be glad to admit it”
(607c). Earlier on, in book vi, Socrates humorously and quite accurately describes
himself as “greedy for images” (488a). And Socrates’s argument at the very end
of the Symposium that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy
surely has to be intended as a comment on Plato’s own writing, in the Symposium.
Plato is well aware that he himself is, among other things, a poet, and he is quite
consciously leaving us with the task of figuring out how to reconcile his critique
of poetry with his unapologizing practice of it. Hegel responds to Plato’s challenge
with his account of “absolute Spirit,” in which Art is surpassed by Religion and both
are then surpassed by Philosophy. His point is that when conceptual thinking, as in
Philosophy, is possible, it’s superior to the imagistic thinking of Religion and to the
sheer imagery of Art. But this is not to say that conceptual thinking can or should
be carried on in complete independence from imagery. On the contrary, Hegel’s
basic principle that the infinite is only as the self-transcending of the finite (HSL pp.
145–46, SuW 5:160, GW 21:133) tells us that conceptual thinking will appreciate
and seek to embody what’s true in all of the preceding phases of Nature and Spirit,
including Art (and thus poetry) and Religion. That is why Hegel lectured at length
on the philosophy of art and the philosophy of religion (not to mention politics,
psychology, biology, etc.). In these elaborations, Hegel is simply filling in some of
the empty spaces in the vision that Plato outlined for us in the Republic, Symposium,
Phaedrus, and Timaeus.
10 Soren Kierkegaard (1843/1941).
11 Plato acknowledges this in the “God-given madness” section of the Phaedrus
(244–45). Hegel acknowledges it in his discussion of the preconscious “feeling soul,”
in G. W. F. Hegel (1971), pp. 94–139, pars. 405–8.

Chapter 7: Plato on reason, love, and

inspiration, pp. 157–184
1 An important thread of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy in England
and Germany (the Cambridge Platonists and Shaftesbury, and Leibniz through
Mendelssohn) did give a central role to love and was largely inspired by Plato. (See
Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton, eds. [2008], and Frederick Beiser [2009].) I
quoted Hegel’s single most important statement on love in Chapter 2: “The universal

240   N OTES
 is therefore free power; . . . it could also be called free love” (HSL, p. 603, SuW 6:277,
GW 12: 35). For an explanation of the significance of love in Hegel’s system, see
Wallace (2005), chapters 3–6 and especially p. 216.
2 Needless to say, Roman Catholic higher education and writing represent an exception
to my generalizations here and elsewhere in this book.
3 Interpretations of Plato on love which I have found helpful are A. J. Festugiere
(1935/1975); Suzanne Lilar (1965), chapter on “The Pagan Moment”; L. A. Kosman
(1976); R. E. Allen (1991); James M. Rhodes (2003); Rosemary Desjardins (2004),
chapter 5; Frisbee Sheffield (2006); and Jill Gordon (2012). Rhodes gives the most
coherent account that I’ve seen of the entire Symposium, together with its historical
context, while Kosman comes closest to what I want to say about “birth in beauty” in
the Symposium.
4 This was the theme of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (in Nietzsche
[1968]; first published 1871). It enabled this highly trained classical philologist to
assert with a straight face that “Socrates might be called the typical non-mystic, in
whom, by a hypertrophy, the logical nature is developed as excessively as instinctive
wisdom is in the mystic. . . . It is only in the spirit of music that we can understand
the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual” (Nietzsche [1968], pp. 88,
104). A recent version of this canard that classical philosophy suffocates inspiration
is Hubert Dreyfus and Sean D. Kelly (2011), which I reviewed in the London Times
Literary Supplement, July 8, 2011 (review available online, September 2013). Effective
ripostes to the assumptions about Socrates that Nietzsche articulates here can be
found in Jonathan Shear (1990), chapters 1–3 (which compare Plato’s account of
Socrates to accounts of Zen, Yoga, and Vedanta), and John Bussanich (1999).
5 E. R. Dodds (1951), pp. 218–19.
6 A useful survey of Athens’s romantic practices can be found in C. D. C. Reeve’s
Introduction to his (2006). Suzanne Lilar gave a rich and balanced account of the
effect of ancient Greek gender roles on Plato’s thinking about love in the chapter, “The
Pagan Moment,” of her (1965).
7 James M. Rhodes (2003), p. 184.
8 Agathon’s speech and Socrates’s dialogue with Agathon, which I’m skipping over here,
are well analyzed by James Rhodes in chapter 5 of his (2003).
9 F. Sheffield writes that Plato provides “a description of the philosophical character in
action from the outset,” or he speaks to those who are “intellectually inclined from
the outset” (Sheffield [2006], pp. 117–19 and p. 119 n. 7). For a similar view see G. R.
F. Ferrari, “Platonic Love,” in R. Kraut, ed. (1992), p. 261.
10 Ken Wilber usefully identified the assumption that we must either embrace
individuality as such or reject it and regress to a previous stage, as the “pre-/trans-
fallacy”: the assumption that any state that’s “beyond” or “trans-“ individuality
is equivalent to what is developmentally “pre-“ (prior) to it (Wilber [2000], pp.
210–13). One prominent writer who makes this assumption is Sigmund Freud in his
discussion of Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling,” in Freud (1989), chapter 1.
11 The Symposium speaks here of beauty, whereas the Republic speaks of the Good.
Plato explains the intimate connection between beauty and goodness in an important
passage in the Phaedrus, where he has Socrates say that “justice and self-control do
not shine out through their images down here. . . . Beauty alone has this privilege, to

NOTES    241
 be the most visible and the most loved” (250b-d). That is, of the Forms, beauty is the
most visible, it “shines out,” and thus (we may take it) it serves often as the visible or
sensible representative of the ultimate Form, which is the Good.
12 Commentators on the Symposium and the Phaedo generally seem to accept the claim
that souls can exhibit beauty more clearly than bodies do as a Platonic axiom that
doesn’t need defense. But it seems that what underlies it is, as I suggest here, that
because one’s soul expresses one’s choices, it expresses oneself more than one’s body
(as such) does.
13 This issue about Diotima’s argument was particularly stressed by Gregory Vlastos,
in his influential paper, “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato,” in Vlastos
(1973).
14 Here is the answer to Martha Nussbaum’s complaint ([2003], p. 498) that “the
Platonic lover, . . . viewing the object of her love as a seat of valuable properties, and
therefore as a suitable vehicle for creation, neglects in the process the other person’s
own agency and choice.” On the contrary, since the Platonic lover cares about her
beloved’s soul, she cares about her beloved’s activities and ideas, and thus precisely
about her beloved’s agency and choice.
15 Martha Nussbaum paints a more appealing picture of Alcibiades in chapter 6 of her
(1986/2001). But in doing so she downplays the most salient features of Alcibiades’s
reputation: that he was ultimately a traitor to Athens and that he was suspected of
having desecrated religious statues and mysteries. Surely Plato expects his audience
to have these features in the forefront of their minds and to draw the obvious contrast
with Socrates.
16 F. Sheffield ([2006], p. 204) appropriately describes Alcibiades’s attachment to
Socrates as “idolatrous.”
17 This is my response to Martha Nussbaum’s question, “Where . . . do all these ‘must’s
come from?” in Diotima’s description of the “ascent” ([1986/2001], p. 179). They
come not from a “prudent” (p. 179) decision to come up with “intersubstitutable”
beauties (p. 180) in case one loses the first beauty but rather from the lover’s desire
that he and his beloved should enjoy, as much as possible, what’s truly good or
beautiful and not just whatever currently seems to them to be good. Attention to
the parallels between ascent in the Symposium and ascent in the Republic, and to the
context of the latter, makes this clear.
18 Freud [1989], pp. 29–30, 32–34. If the “drives” were merely mechanical, as Freud’s
metaphors often seem to suggest, then it’s hard to imagine how this “sublimation”
could take place. Freud’s persisting attachment to mechanical metaphors such as
“displacement” (Freud [1989], p. 29) prevents him from spelling out, as Plato and
his successors including Hegel do, how the primitive mental forces collaborate
with reason by recognizing that it’s only through reason’s guidance that they can
participate in higher forms of organization. More specifically, it’s only in this way
that they can participate in self-determination, freedom, and the fullest reality. C. G.
Jung’s interpretation of sublimation as “ascent” ([1974], pp. 129–31), rather than as
“displacement,” is more in line with Platonism, though Jung’s indications of what this
“ascent” might amount to for people who are imbued with modern science need the
kind of supplementation that I have tried to provide in this book.
19 “Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” Standard Edition 19:218.
20 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1958), vol. 2, ch. 44.

242   N OTES
21 The evocative stories that Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly recount, in Dreyfus and
Kelly (2011), of ecstasies that “whoosh up” in a group of people, all lend themselves
readily to Plato’s account. They are all cases in which the group shares a perception
that they have witnessed something truly excellent, whether the excellence is ethical,
artistic, or athletic. And thus the philosophers of intellect and value, from Plato
through Kant and Hegel, can illuminate these shared experiences in a way that anti-
“intellectual” writers cannot. The claim is not, of course, that intellect can produce
these valuable phenomena single-handedly, but that it’s a necessary ingredient in
our love of them, insofar as we judge and (when appropriate) will try to defend our
judgment that they are truly excellent.
22 Denis de Rougemont (1983) gives an extended and provocative discussion of the
incompatibility of love and marriage according to Tristan and the “courtly love”
poets. Like Richard Wagner and Hollywood, de Rougemont doesn’t focus on or take
seriously Plato’s suggestion that there’s an important connection between eros and
true rationality.
23 Anders Nygren contrasted the “acquisitive” and “egocentric” character of Platonic
eros with the “sacrificial” and “unselfish” character of what he called agape (Nygren
[1932/1982], p. 210). Gregory Vlastos described Diotima’s view in similar terms: “It is
not said or implied or so much as hinted at that ‘birth in beauty’ should be motivated
by love of persons—that the ultimate purpose of the creative act should be to enrich
the lives of persons who are themselves worthy of love for their own sake” (Vlastos
[1973, 1981], p. 31). In her (2001), Martha Nussbaum picked up Vlastos’s notion that
Platonic love is “creative,” and wrote of “Diotima: Love as Creation in the Fine and
the Good” (pp. 486–500). “The Platonic lover, . . . viewing the object of her love as a
seat of valuable properties, and therefore as a suitable vehicle for creation, neglects in
the process the other person’s own agency and choice. . . . The idea that each person
has her own distinct life to live simply plays no role in the analysis” (Nussbaum
[2001], pp. 498–99).
24 When Jonathan Lear says that “it is this particular subjectivity with which we are
pregnant” (Lear [1998], p. 166), he neglects the role of the Good and the beautiful
in unifying (Republic 443e) the soul and thus making it self-governing. This role
is entirely compatible with Lear’s claim that “the body, its drives, and the bodily
expression of mind all lend vitality to ‘higher’ mental functions” (same page).
25 “The love which . . . calls the other to be his true self, is a love which at once
recognizes and bids the other to his true virtue and beauty,” and “this is the meaning
of Diotima’s definition of love as [‘birth in beauty’]” (Louis Kosman, “Platonic Love,”
in Soble, ed. [1989], p. 159 and note 29; emphasis added). From what Kosman says
and from what I’ve said about the pursuit of the Good leading to self-government,
it’s clear that (contrary to Nussbaum [2001], p. 499) Plato definitely does speak to the
fact “that each person has her own distinct life to live.”
26 Terence Irwin maintains that what he describes as Diotima’s notion of propagating
oneself through others (“A is concerned for B as a way of propagating A”) does not
involve an “objectionably domineering attitude” to others (Irwin [1995], p. 311).
Plato “can claim to justify non-instrumental concern for another, for the other’s
sake. . . . For if we actually propagate ourselves in other people, then we have the
same sort of reason to care about the other people as we have to care about ourselves”
(p. 313; emphasis added). Though I agree that what Irwin describes isn’t literally
“instrumental,” since it doesn’t make an instrument of something other than “oneself,”

NOTES    243
 it’s not clear how propagating “my” self in another person is not domineering. For
the description (“propagating A in B”) leaves one wondering what is the significance
of what B was prior to the propagation. A. W. Price wonders, “What confirms that
the [beloved’s] better self, as conceived by the lover, is the true self? The only test
remaining would seem to be the future, and that can be made to measure” (Price
[1989], p. 101). Jennifer Whiting raised a similar issue of apparent “colonization”
of the other, in connection with Irwin’s similar account of Aristotle on friendship
(Whiting [1991], p. 9). If, on the other hand, I’m right that what is “propagated” by
love as Diotima understands it is, in fact, self-government, then it’s impossible in the
nature of the case for the propagator to dominate the propagatee’s functioning. As
Louis Kosman says (in Soble, ed.[1989], p. 159), the lover “calls the other to be his
true self, . . . bids the other to his true virtue and beauty.” The relevance of what the
other already was, prior to the “propagation,” is that the other and those who knew
him can undoubtedly feel or see in him the potential for the virtue and beauty that
are actualized (“called,” as Kosman puts it) through the “propagation.”
27 Regarding uniqueness, Richard Kraut offers these comments: “It is obviously true of
each lover that there is only one person with whom he has had these fine discussions
and produced these fine children” (in G. Fine, ed. [2011], pp. 301–2). Troy Jollimore
(2011) develops a similar thought about what he calls “love’s blindness.”
28 As Richard Kraut points out in G. Fine, ed. (2011), p. 302.
29 Nygren (1932/1982), p. 210.
30 “Birth in beauty” describes us as emerging into self-government through a quasi-
natural process of “birth.” Something similar seems to reappear in (a) Aristotle’s
conception of “matter” as having within it a principle of (i.e., the potentiality for)
a certain kind of actualization or form, (b) Plotinus’s description of the world as
“turning back” toward the One, and (c) Hegel’s account of the infinite emerging from
the finite, and Spirit from Nature. In contrast to the usual materialist assumption
that matter is something that merely happens, in the course of time, to take on
certain living and intelligent forms, (a)–(c) all identify a fundamental process “in”
the physical world that tends toward a kind of self-government. They all see what I’ve
been calling “transcendence” as quasi-natural.
31 The recent turning by Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others toward
a neo-Aristotelian “virtue ethics” is a salutary development in that it reopens the
questions of “wisdom” and the relation between head and heart. Its weakness is that
it tends not to appreciate how Kant’s and Hegel’s interest in autonomy or freedom is
in principle continuous with Plato’s and Aristotle’s interest in reason, so that German
Idealism is in principle aligned with, rather than opposed to, “virtue ethics.”
32 I say we love self-transcending nature because I don’t think one can be inspired
by, and thus love, sheer mechanism as such. Whereas a “world in a grain of sand,”
and “heaven in a wild flower”—those we can love. We see in the flower something
analogous to what we see in a beautifully souled human being. It’s an inner freedom
made outwardly visible. To take some other examples of natural beauty: in a beautiful
(or “sublime”) landscape, sunset, or galaxy, we see the spectacle of a world that cares
little for us, but yet in some way has given birth to us. It is free of our anxieties and
troubles, and its grandeur, creativity, and fecundity are qualities that we admire
and would like (if we were able) to emulate. And indeed we may be able to emulate
them, insofar as our understanding of who we are goes beyond our finite, human
boundaries. This is how nature can inspire us despite being prima facie “inhuman.”

244   N OTES
 This is also how I would interpret Hegel’s description of the beauty of nature as “an
imperfect incomplete mode [of beauty], a mode which in its substance is contained
in the spirit itself ” (Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 2). Since the infinite is only as the self-
transcending of the finite (HSL pp. 145–46, SuW 5:160, GW 21:133), nature is an
essential aspect of Spirit or freedom, and we find nature beautiful insofar as we
experience it as transcending itself (or insofar as we experience it, as Hegel says,
as “contained in its substance” in spirit). The second and third volumes of Hegel’s
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences explain how nature does this (and see
Wallace [2005], chs. 3 and 6).
33 Pieces of this work have been done and are being done by many people. As I’ve
mentioned, comprehensive outlines are provided by Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and
R. G. Collingwood (1924); and see Wallace, “How Plato and Hegel Integrate the
Sciences, the Arts, Religion, and Philosophy” (forthcoming).

Chapter 8: Plato on “becoming like God”,

pp. 185–204
1 Terence Irwin ([1995], p. 309) discusses the Timaeus’s passage about the demiurge’s
lack of jealousy so as to provide what he calls a “full picture of the motives that Plato
takes to support interpersonal propagation.” But his discussion of the demiurge
forms, in effect, a parenthesis, from which he returns on p. 310 to Diotima’s focus
on self-preservation. His discussion of the philosopher’s relation to his community
and to humankind in general, in the remainder of the chapter, makes no reference to
the demiurge model and appears not to rely on it. But certainly at least by the time
one comes to the philosopher’s dealings with humankind as a whole (p. 316), the
demiurge model would be a more promising basis than Diotima’s model, by itself. For
it’s difficult to imagine how humankind as a whole could be needed in order to ensure
the continuation of the qualities that the philosopher values in herself.
2 David Sedley (1999) and Julia Annas (2000), Chapter 3, discuss Plato’s theme of
“becoming like God” without viewing it as having the potential to be an effective
foundation for ethics. John M. Armstrong (2004) shows how Plato’s Laws spells out
ways in which we can become like God through leadership and membership in a just
community.
3 E. R. Dodds surveyed Greek depictions of divine “jealousy” (phthonos) in chapter 2 of
his (1951).
4 F. G. Herrmann (“Phthonos in the world of Plato’s Timaeus,” in D. Konstan and N.
K. Rutter, eds. [2003], pp. 58–59) lists Protagoras 320c1 and 2, Symposium 210d6,
Phaedrus 247a7 and 253b7–c2, Republic 499d10–501b8, and Laws 679c. But after
reviewing the Timaeus passage and this background in some detail, Herrmann
concludes that “it is still not clear . . . why goodness excludes any withholding and
hindering and debarring,” which are actions that he has found in the semantic field of
phthonos (p. 75).
5 The one fully explicit linking of an identification of the Good and the One with
Plato himself is in fact in a fragment of a music theorist and student of Aristotle,
Aristoxenus, who reported that Plato’s public lecture On the Good “turned out to be

NOTES    245
 about mathematics—numbers, geometry, astronomy—and to crown all about the
thesis that the good is [the] one, [which] seemed to [the listeners] something quite
paradoxical” (J. Barnes, ed. [1984], vol. 2, p. 2397). I insert “[the]” before “good,” here,
in line with the argument of C. C. W. Taylor (in G. Fine, ed. [2011], p. 181, n. 19) that
there would have been nothing especially “paradoxical” in asserting merely that “the
good is one.” Taylor explains that the definite article, “the,” is often elided after einai,
“to be,” in Greek. Aristotle himself links the doctrine that the good is the one with
those (meaning, presumably, Plato) “who maintain the existence of unchangeable
substances” (Metaphysics 14.4.1091b13–15; cf. Eudemian Ethics 1218a19ff). It’s
possible, of course, that Aristotle didn’t fully understand what Plato was driving at
in the lectures that he reports, but it seems very unlikely that he invented anything
substantial in them or that he ascribed to Plato ideas that really belonged to other
people, for there were presumably plenty of people alive when Aristotle was writing
who could have corrected him on points like these. One can find these “unwritten
doctrines” potentially important and illuminating with regard to the dialogues,
without believing that Plato reserved them for insiders or that he ultimately rejected
writing (on the grounds that he mentions in the Phaedrus or in the Seventh Letter).
For accounts of the oral teachings and their relation to the dialogues, see H. J. Krämer
(1959) and (1990), J. N. Findlay (1974), Kenneth Sayre (1983), and Lloyd Gerson
(2013), pp. 91–129. An expert who minimizes the significance of Aristotle’s testimony
is Harold Cherniss (1944) and (1945), to whom all of the above authors respond.
6 A stimulating account of Plato’s overall relation to Parmenides is given by H. J.
Krämer (1959), pp. 487–551.
7 Enneads V.2.1. This “overflowing” is one of the two great themes of Plotinus’s
metaphysics, the other being the “turning back” (epistrophe) in which beings in the
world realize that their unity depends upon the One. The same pattern of outflow and
turning back structures Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the outflow
occurring in the course of the Logic section and the turning back occupying the
sections on Nature and Spirit.
8 Michael Hanby suggests (following D. C. Schindler) that in dealing with the
difference between Forms and their images, “Plato seems to be on the horns of
a dilemma. To admit that the principle of unity—beauty or the good—is also
the principle of difference appears to introduce division into the simple unity of
the transcendent source. To admit a second positive principle to account for this
difference seems tantamount to affirming the Gnostic ultimacy of two principles,
which is unintelligible and thus irrational” ([2017], p. 56). I am suggesting that Plato
sees that since “jealousy” determines one by one’s relation to the other that one is
jealous of, the Good can be fully “one,” fully self-contained, only if it’s “generous”
(as Hanby puts it, p. 74) rather than “jealous.” So no second principle is required;
properly understood, oneness alone does the trick.
9 Julia Annas ([2000], p. 64) comments that the demiurge “certainly has a mind and
intelligence, and desires things to be as good as possible, but this does not seem like
much of a basis for acquiring virtues.”
10 It’s true, as Julia Annas points out ([2000], p. 65), that Socrates in the Theaetetus
passage makes the philosopher who seeks to “become like God” appear to be
completely unaware of the world and his body. I take this as either (a) comic
hyperbole or (b) the tendency that I noted in Plato’s talk about “flight from the
world,” to have contempt for lower things. Possibility (b) seems to directly contradict

246   N OTES
 the attitude of the demiurge in the Timaeus, who rather than having contempt for
the world, does everything he can to make the world as good as it can be. I don’t
think Plato can have it both ways, both fly from the world and imitate the demiurge. I
would say the same about Plotinus’s apparent dismissal of “civic” virtue, which Annas
discusses (pp. 66–70). If we human beings are to imitate the demiurge, I don’t see
how we can dismiss conventional virtues. In order to be self-governing, God must be
benevolent, so those who seek to be “like God” must likewise be benevolent. And I
don’t think benevolence is compatible with contempt.
11 John M. Armstrong (2004), p. 181.
12 Anders Nygren (1932/1982) argued that in contrast to the “agape” love that
Christianity finds in its God, Platonism’s “eros” is inherently self-centered. Nygren
didn’t consider how nominally “egoistic” self-propagation must propagate true self-
government, and thus promote the independent functioning of others, nor did he
consider how someone who seeks to “become like God” must be benevolent in the
same way as the demiurge who tries to make the world as much like himself (i.e., as
self-governing) as possible. So that self-propagation and becoming like God both
entail unselfish benevolence.
13 In chapter 18 of Irwin (1995), Terence Irwin concludes that Plato’s argument in the
Republic can’t “justify all the legitimate demands of morality. For we might insist that
the moral claims of other people on us do not depend on their being our friends or
on their belonging to some community that we care about” (p. 316). I have suggested
that in the Republic together with the Timaeus and Philebus, Plato presents good
reasons for believing that a fully rational person will try to “become like God” by
doing everything she can to make the world as a whole as good as it can be. In this
way she will care about and foster all humans and (indeed) everything.
14 Menn (1995), p. 12, agreeing with R. Hackforth, “Plato’s Theism,” in R. E. Allen, ed.
(1965). F. M. Cornford and Harold Cherniss in different ways took the demiurge to
be immanent in souls and thus in the world (F. M. Cornford [1937], Harold Cherniss
[1944]). Menn’s view is supported by Thomas K. Johansen (2004) and David Sedley
(2007).
15 Like Plato’s theology as I have described it, Plotinus’s account of the One and the
world as related to each other through “proceeding outward” (proodos) and “turning
back” (epistrophe) seems likewise to be based on our experience of turning toward
Oneness in pursuit of our own self-government. “Turning back” is our pursuit of
Oneness in ourselves (which is why Plotinus says that the One is “in us” [Enneads
V.I.11]), and “proceeding outward” is the character of what has truly “turned back”
and become One. It cannot be One if it limits itself by excluding others from its
concern, so it doesn’t do that.
16 In chapter 6 of Sedley (2007), David Sedley makes clear the fundamental agreement
between Plato and Aristotle as supporters of teleology. This makes one wonder
why he chose to focus his book on the ancient world’s apparently less fundamental
disagreements about “creationism” (the issue on which Plato and Aristotle appear
to disagree) rather than on its apparently more fundamental disagreements about
teleology versus chance. The present-day disputes between “creationists” and
mainline scientists (where the former have in mind “a being” of great power) have
this same feature, that they distract us from the more fundamental issue of whether
goodness, as such, plays an essential role in reality. If the divine is truly infinite, it can’t
be characterized merely by power, but must have the authority that goes with (the

NOTES    247
 pursuit of) goodness. This is the simple message of Platonism which is lost in the din
of popular disputes about supreme “beings.”
17 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1249b13–15: “For it is not by giving commands that god is
ruler, but as the good towards which practical wisdom gives commands.”
18 The best-known modern treatment of the issue of teleology is Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Judgment (1790). Because Kant did not see how rational self-government
can be understood as an intensification of the more rudimentary forms of self-
government that I’ve just mentioned, his treatment left an unclarified residue of
dualism between “nature” and what is other than nature (Ak 5:184), or between
“constitutive” principles such as efficient causation and merely “regulative” ones such
as teleology (Ak 5:361). This is where Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel provide a more
satisfying conception. On Hegel’s treatment of teleology, see chapter 5 of Wallace
(2005) and p. 249 in particular.
19 As I’ve mentioned, Lloyd Gerson gives lucid accounts of Plato’s treatment of
knowledge in his (2003) and his (2013). Andrea Kern (2017) is an important
contemporary account, based on Aristotle, of knowledge.
20 In his useful analytical survey of interpretations of Plato’s “theology,” Michael
Bordt categorizes them as “religious,” “metaphysical,” or “cosmological” (C. Horn
et al., eds. [2009], pp. 200–10). “Religious” interpretations are most influenced by
Plato’s critique of conventional religion in book ii of the Republic; “metaphysical”
interpretations are most influenced by Plato’s account of the Forms and the Form
of the Good, in Republic books vi-vii; and “cosmological” interpretations are
most influenced by Plato’s creation story of the “demiurge” in the Timaeus and
his argument for the existence of gods in Laws x. Bordt plausibly suggests (p. 210)
that an interpretation that follows Laws x 897b1 in identifying “God” with “nous”
(intellect or reason) can combine the strong points of all three approaches. I would
simply add that the “metaphysical” aspect is nevertheless more fundamental than
the other two, because only Plato’s metaphysics (together with his account of the
soul in Republic iv) explains why a “theology” is rationally necessary at all. The
cosmological argument set forth in Laws x is, as I’ve suggested, inadequate as it
stands, and it has to be supplemented by the account of the soul’s “transcendence”
or upward motion in the Phaedo and especially in Republic iv-vii in order to
constitute a convincing argument for a transcendent dimension of reality as
a whole, and thus establish the need for a “theology.” Besides which, only the
“metaphysical” argument in Phaedo and Republic explains why theology’s God
possesses authority, as opposed to mere power.
21 In his valuable (1935/1975), which is the most comprehensive account of Plato’s
rational “mysticism” that I have found, Andre Jean Festugiere understands Plato’s
notion of mystical “vision” or theoria as referring to episodes in a person’s life
which begin and end and are thus directly comparable to what we call “mystical
experiences.” I’m sure that Festugiere’s interpretation captures part of what Plato
had in mind in the passages that we’re discussing, but I strongly suspect that Plato
was open to the broader interpretation that I’m proposing, as well. For it seems
to capture the meaning of Plato’s key descriptors as well as Festugiere’s more
conventional interpretation does. When Plato speaks of “vision” in these contexts
he doesn’t, of course, mean vision through our physical eyes. So there is no need
to assume that this “vision” is always episodic, beginning and (most importantly)
ending in time, in the way that physical vision does. And the Symposium passage

248   N OTES
 seems to speak against such assumptions when it says that “there if anywhere
should a person live his life, beholding that Beauty” (211d, emphasis added). David
J. Yount describes the vision of the Good as an “everlasting and self-sustaining
experience” ([2017], p. 23), though he also says that “one does not lose the fruits of”
that experience (same page, my emphasis), thus somewhat obscuring the clarity of
his previous claim.

Chapter 9: Ordinary and extraordinary

experiences of God, pp. 205–212
1 No doubt people also experience God in contemplative prayer, as David Bentley Hart
maintains in chapter 6 of his (2013). But I think it’s a mistake to suppose that prayer
that we intend as such is the only or even the primary way in which we experience
God.
2 When I speak of us as having “direct access to God,” as our own inner freedom,
forgiveness, and so forth, readers who are familiar with Hegel may wonder: Doesn’t
Hegel say that “there is nothing in heaven or in nature or mind or anywhere else which
does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation” (HSL p. 68, SuW 5:66, GW
21:54), so that the notion of “direct” (i.e., presumably, immediate) “access” is perhaps
questioned by Hegel? The “direct” access that I describe is certainly also indirect,
inasmuch as to understand what we have access to, through it, we need a good deal
of additional information and thought. What these experiences are experiences of
(whether it’s “freedom,” “forgiveness,” “God,” or anything else) isn’t written on their
foreheads; like everything important, these concepts are sophisticated, as well as
simple. But the access that we have to God through these experiences is nevertheless
direct in a way that the access that we might have to some object that’s “outside” our
world is not. It’s direct inasmuch as freedom, forgiveness and God (according to
Hegel’s account) are in us in a way that external objects aren’t.
3 Eckhart Tolle (1999), p. 187; first emphasis added.
4 Eckhart Tolle (1999), p. 191.
5 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1997), p. 70 (in Lecture 3).
6 See W. T. Stace (1960), William J. Wainwright (1981), Jerome Gellmann (2001), Jerome
Gellmann, “Mysticism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online 2010, and Richard
H. Jones (2017).
7 Finding meaning in experiences of cosmic unity or of “pure consciousness” (Forman
[1990], Shear [1990]) will likewise require going beyond their immediate content.
What is the importance of unity or of pure consciousness? What do they tell us about
ourselves and our lives? These experiences can answer these questions only by being
interpreted. By contrast, our everyday experiences of inner freedom, love, forgiveness,
and so forth carry their meaning on their face, as it were. If “God” has the significance
that inner freedom, love, and forgiveness have, then we understand immediately how
“God” is significant for our lives.
8 To mention another kind of “extraordinary experience,” many people from antiquity
through Aldous Huxley down to the present have thought that experiences generated

NOTES    249
 by substances like soma/haoma, mescaline, LSD, ayahuasca, ibogaine, or alcohol
give us access to something divine. I doubt whether many of these experiences give
us access to anything divine, though they certainly often give us a vacation from
our normal experience of an apparently very undivine reality. What seems to be
absent from most, though perhaps not all of these experiences is a process of inner
integration that generates genuine inner freedom and (thereby) genuine experience
of the divine. Here again, as with the more widely acknowledged kinds of “mystical
experience,” apparently extraordinary experiences need to be set alongside more
ordinary experiences of liberation and understood and evaluated in the same way that
we understand and evaluate these “ordinary” experiences.
9 Walt Whitman (1976), p. 41.

Appendix: Comparisons between the

Plato/Hegel argument for a God within
us, and several well-known arguments
for God, pp. 213–217
1 C. S. Lewis (2001), pp. 22, 24.
2 C. S. Lewis (2001), p. 10.
3 Summa Theologica, Question 2, Article 3, “On the contrary,” first way.

250   N OTES
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INDEX

Abrams, M. H. Bordt, Michael 248

Natural Supernaturalism 234 Bosanquet, Bernard 39, 40, 70
Adamson, Peter 16 Bradley, Francis Herbert 5, 39–40, 44,
Alcibiades 30, 35 232, 234
Anaxagoras 126 Brahman 10
Anaximander 189 Brandom, Robert 229
Anaximenes 189 Bröcker, Walter 4, 118
Annas, Julia 246–7 Buddha nature 10
Anscombe, G. E. M. 140
anthropotheism 71 Caird, Edward 39
Aristotle 4, 25, 28, 108, 140 Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias 151
not a naturalist 77–8, 218 Cambridge Platonists 173
reality and goodness 196, 198 Campbell, Joseph 30
second nature 55 Capra, Fritjof 98
ascent, see also transcendence Carnap, Rudolph 49
in Hegel 59–60, 78 charisma 83
rational or Platonic 4, 7, 37, 89, 217 Charmides, Plato’s cousin 151
Austen, Jane 158, 175 choice 1
authenticity 30 Chopra, Deepak 98
Ayer, Alfred Jules 6, 48–9, 123 Christman, John 140
Language, Truth, and Logic 48 Collingwood, Robin George 25
value as emotion 48 common sense 4, 81
creationism 247
beauty Critias, Plato’s uncle 151
in everything 19
natural 244 Dante Alighieri 28, 158
reason in 21, 222–3 Darwinism 119
Beghards 103 Dawkins, Richard 96
being oneself 29, 64 deism 98–9
Bergson, Henri 5, 13, 98 Democritus 196
Berkeley, George 8, 81–2 Descartes, Rene 92, 108
Berlin, Isaiah 146–7 Dewey, John 130
Blake, William 19 Dickinson, Emily 28
Blumenberg, Hans 4 Dionysus 160
critique of Plato 124–5 disenchantment of the world 55, 157
body Dodds, E. R. 159
mind and 3, 24 Dreyfus, Hubert 243
dualism 6, 7, 37, 45, 48, 49, 71, 76 mechanism and 24
Hegel’s critique of 105 mutual influence and 86
Plato and 105 Plato and 140–2
rational ascent and 4 truth and 121
Dubois, W. E. B. 139 voluntarist theory of 144
Freud, Sigmund 30, 104, 241
Eckhart, Meister 103, 108 sublimation 171, 242
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 5, 25, 26 Fukuyama, Francis 231
“The Over-Soul” 38–9
Plato and Plotinus and 38–9 Gautama, Siddhartha 35
“Self-reliance” 38–9 Gauthier, David 49
empiricism 28 Gentile, Giovanni 70
critics of 238 Gerson, Lloyd 78, 120, 219
Epicurus 112, 196 Gibbard, Allan 49
Erasmus 108 Gnostics 106, 108
eternity Gobsch, Wolfram 6, 7, 21
in an hour 19 God 1
ethics 2, 69, 244 arguments for existence of 213
Euthyphro, in Plato 35 authority of 11, 31
examined life 10 conventional
existentialism 28, 121 doesn’t transcend 32
externality isn’t orthodox 96
to each other 2–3 direct knowledge of 218, 249
as distinct but not separate 12
fact as doubt 92
value and 2, 23, 24 experience of 204–12
value reconciled with 23 everyday 205–12, 210
faith 14, 37 extraordinary 207, 249
Fechner, Gustav 40 freedom and 67, 91
Festugiere, Andre Jean 248 human responsibility and 68, 93
Feuerbach, Ludwig 71–2, 89 love and 67
Essence of Christianity 71–3 orthodox vs.Pelagian 94
Ficino, Marsilio 173 Plato/Hegel 69
Findlay, John Niemeyer 5, 6, 21, science as a part of 22
120 separate
his “other-worldly geography” 51 not self-governing 32, 94
first-person view orthodox Christian thinking
vs. third-person view 7 and 221
Foot, Philippa 49 as separate being 11, 87–8
forgiveness 19, 20 truly infinite
Forman, Robert K. C. 249 can’t exclude 18
freedom 29–30 in us 14, 17, 31, 88–9, 90,
causation and 85 100–1
depends on freedom of all 19 gives beatitude/salvation 33
empiricist theory of 144–6 gives world full reality 33
God and 67 grandiosity? 17
inner 10, 29, 31, 219 loves everything 33
reason in 21 not impersonal 34
love and ethics and 17 prayer and 91

264   Index
 whom we can know 12–14 Science of Logic 20, 73, 76
who we are 17 secularism and 75
but we often don’t know separate God not self-governing 32
this 18 Spirit 25
Is this grandiosity? 17 contrasted to Nature 77
worthy of worship 12, 31 state and Idea 231
Gorgias 140, 189 transcendence
Greek cosmology critique of ordinary conceptions
goodness vs.chance 196 of 51
guidance, higher source of 5 the True and the Good 64–5,
234
Hare, Richard 49 Heidegger, Martin 4, 41, 49, 99
Hart, David Bentley 248–9 on philosophers’ God 99
Hartshorne, Charles 226 on Plato’s idealism 127, 228
Hegel, G. W. F. 4, 12, 37 on science 228
arts and 240 Heine, Heinrich 17
critique of the finite 50 Heraclitus 189
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Herbert, George 173
Sciences 20 hero’s journey 29
ethics 69 Hitler, Adolf 149–50
fascism and 76 Hobbes, Thomas 112, 151
God in us 70–1 Homer 34
grandiosity? 17 hopes
his God millennarian and apocalyptic 20
Christian teachings and 26 humanism 18, 101, 222
deism and 98 humans
grandiosity? 222 as humans, are not God 18
Heidegger’s requirements as inner freedom and love, are
and 99 God 18
pantheism and 97 Hume, David 4, 37, 109, 112
truly transcendent 26, 32 Huxley, Aldous 102, 235
history 74–6 The Perennial Philosophy 102
idealism 8, 24, 62, 73, 81–2
infinity idealism
critique of the spurious 51 existence of what’s not self-
as finite’s self-transcending 57 determining and 25
true 26 George Berkeley 24, 81
love and intellect 72 Immanuel Kant 24, 81
Marx and 70, 73, 148 Plato/Hegel 8, 24, 62, 80–2
a mystic? 16, 221 anthropocentric? 82
naturalism and 4, 76 self-transcendence and 25
Nazis and 148 point of 120–1, 127
Phenomenology of Spirit 20 ideals 1
Plato and 37, 78–9 identity, higher and lower 10
Plotinus and 246 identity crisis 9, 14, 18, 47, 125
reality 60, 80–2 traditional inner drama 47
as oneself 60 Ilyin, Ivan 70
reason and nature 57–61 infinity 54
religion and 69, 70–1 true 18, 26, 50, 58, 89, 96

I ndex   265
intellect our identity crisis and 56
love or emotions and 3 reason and nature 55
Irwin, Terence 16, 243, 245, 247 Robert Brandom and 229
MacIntyre, Alasdair 140
Jaeschke, Walter 76 Marx, Karl 39, 40
James, William 5, 41, 42, 205, 207 on dialectic 73
British Idealists and 39–40 Hegel and 70
Jefferson, Thomas 139 Mass
Jesus 35–6 Roman Catholic 31
overriding value is inner 36 materialism 28
Jung, Carl Gustav 30, 104, 152–3 me
sublimation 242 you reconciled with 23, 54
mechanism
Kalsched, Donald 221 freedom and 24
Kant, Immanuel 8, 28, 37, 69, 139 Mele, Alfred 233
dualism 108, 248 Menn, Stephen 195–6
Katz, Steven 102 Millar, Alan 150
Keats, John 183 mind
Kelly, Sean 243 body and 3, 24
Kern, Andrea 7 freedom and 3
Kierkegaard, Soren 40, 41, 154–5, modernity
159 immanence and 26
Kimhi, Irad 7, 218, 230 Moore, A. W. 227
knower Moore, George Edward (G.E.) 44, 81
world and 3, 24 “The Value of Religion” 44
knowledge Murdoch, Iris 5, 6, 13, 21
modern problem of 3 art-object and person-object 52–3
Korsgaard, Christine 49 on God 52
Kosman, Louis 243–4 love has power 52
mysticism 1, 5, 15
Lear, Jonathan 25, 178 how it is perennial 102
Leibniz, G. W. 173 individuality and 166
Leucippus 196 monistic vs. theistic 103–4
Lewis, Clive Staples 97 philosophy explains 20
argument from moral law 213 primary meaning of 15
Plato/Hegel version of 214–15 as rational 1, 16, 73
Libet, Benjamin 233 as salvation or awakening 16
Locke, John 139–40 what I don’t mean by 15
love 2 mystics
reason in 21 Christian 36
romantic 174 Islamic 36
stories 173–4 western philosopher 221
Löwith, Karl 74–6
dualism in 73 Nagel, Thomas 7, 232
Lucretius 196 naturalism 23, 49
Luther, Martin 108 Hegel and 4, 76
Neumann, Erich 30
McDowell, John 5, 7, 49, 55 Nicolas Cusanus 172
“The Apperceptive I...” 57 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 41, 83, 108–9,
Mind and World 55–61, 56–7 109, 151, 159

266   Index
nihilism 14, 49, 221 god-given madness 153
Nussbaum, Martha 4, 27, 121, 176 contra Kierkegaard 154–5
Plato answers 242, 243 kinds of 153–4
Nygren, Anders 176, 180, 247 going down 192–3
homosexual romance in 160
object humankind’s dark side and 150–2
reality and 24 idealism 24–5
subject and 23, 24 Jung and 153
reconciled 23 knowledge and 123
objectification 23 Laws
objectivity cosmological proof of God 199
beyond 23 love (see also Plato, Symposium)
critics of Plato on 243
panentheism 226 of individuals 27, 175, 178
pantheism 97 reason and 27, 35, 158
Parmenides 127, 188–90 mathematics and 110, 136
philosophy Meno dialogue 110
love and 157 modern philosophy and 139
Pinkard, Terry 76–8 a mystic? 16, 221
Pippin, Robert 71, 78–9 mystical images in 202–3
Plato 10 nondual rationalism in 109
Alcibiades, picture of 131 not, on the whole, denigrating
anamnesis 238 bodies 27, 109–10
apparent dualism in 108, 148 Parmenides dialogue 188
arts and 228, 240 personalities studied by 129–30
ascent from the Cave 30, 35, 137 Phaedo dialogue 23, 126
allegory of freedom 138 Phaedrus dialogue 153
beauty and the Good 241 Philebus dialogue 188
becoming like God 185 philosopher can become like
virtues and 192 God 156
continuity with later Platonists 36 rational mysticism of 28
critics of 4, 106 reality
critique of naturalism 111, 126, 194 degrees of 27, 115, 128, 237
education 129–30 as oneself 116, 120, 122, 135, 139
Euthyphro, picture of 130–1 reason
fact and value reconciled 127, 238, love and 27, 35, 158, 193–4
239 Republic 25, 30, 116, 165
forgiving and 149 ressentiment 120–1
Form of the Good 123, 135–6 seeking-to-be 190
Forms 115, 117, 120, 123 soul
separateness of 236–7, 238 beauty and 242
freedom and 140 by itself 110
God (see also Plato,Timaeus dialogue) journeys of 126
cosmological proof 199 kinship to Forms 236
immanent or transcendent? 194 parts of 30, 111, 130
jealousy and 28, 187, 191 subsumes body 125
One and 188, 245–6 turning the whole 127
reality as oneself and 156 Symposium 25, 30, 130, 131 (see also
transcendence proof 199–201 Plato, love)
true Good 35 Alcibiades’s speech 169

I ndex   267
 androgynous love 171 most real 7
Aristophanes’s speech 162, 174 object and 24
birth in beauty 244 as oneself 3, 8, 10, 57, 81, 116, 219
Diotima’s speech 162 subject and 24
homosexual romance in 160 ultimate 2
ladder of love 167 reason
learning about the good 163 love and 158–84, 184, 185, 193–4
love as reproduction 164–70 nature and 53
love of individuals 175–8 reconciliation, cultural 25
reason in inspiration 170, 181 religion 2, 69
reproduction of the good 166–7 everyday experience and 209–12
self-government and 176–8, 180 extraordinary experiences
sophists in 161 and 211–12
soul-children more immortal 165 in the making 2
tragedy and comedy 131 traditional 2
uniqueness of the beloved 179 contains core of truth 34, 87, 92
Theaetetus dialogue 130, 186 Rhodes, James 161
becoming like God 186 Rödl, Sebastian 5, 6, 7, 21, 61–5, 108,
Thrasymachus, picture of 131 123
Timaeus dialogue 185 action and normativity 62
God not jealous 187, 245 Categories of the Temporal 61
traumas experienced by 106–8, 142 idealist and materialist 63
true good 111–15, 135 self-consciousness 61
knowledge 135 on self-constitution 63
pleasure 135 Rorty, Richard 4
two-world view? 235, 237 Rosen, Stanley 221, 222, 224
why be moral? 28 Rougemont, Denis de 243
Plato/Aristotle Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37, 129–30,
cognition built into reality 198 139
reality and goodness 196–8 Rumi, Jelaluddin 36, 84, 90, 108
Platonism 4 Russell, Bertrand 4, 6, 42–4, 109, 121,
early modern 240 123, 215
histories of 223 “Mysticism and Logic” 44
Plotinus 28, 36, 108, 130, 246, 247 Ruysbroeck, Jan van 103
Hegel and 248
Polanyi, Michael 6, 7, 21, 50, 108 St Anselm
Popper, Karl 146 ontological argument 216
postmodernism 28 Plato/Hegel version 216
pragmatism 223 St Athanasius 12, 31, 33
Protagoras 140, 189 St Augustine 12, 28, 33, 36, 90
St John of the Cross 103
quantum theology 97 St Paul 12, 31, 33
Quine, W. V. O. 6, 49, 123 St Teresa of Avila 103
St Thomas Aquinas
Rahner, Karl 11, 12, 32, 33 argument for first mover 215
reality 1 Plato/Hegel version 215
degrees of 3, 6, 24, 115–20 Santayana, George 82, 121
higher 1, 5, 9, 10, 11, 22 Sartre, Jean-Paul 41, 139
as the divine 11 scala naturae 117
science as a part of 22 Scanlon, Thomas 49

268   Index
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 40, 159 Taoism 10, 98
Schneewind, J. B. 140 Taylor, Charles 101, 140
Schopenhauer, Arthur 5, 48, 108, 172 Hegel 234
The World as Will and A Secular Age 101
Representation 48 Thales 189
science 1–2 theology
ideologies that claim to speak for 21 negative 221
as a part of God 22 Platonic philosophical 1
rational ascent and 2, 6, 23, 100 Theron, Stephen 230
relation to religion 2, 23 Thompson, Michael 7
scientism 28, 47, 48 Thrasymachus 30, 140, 151
secular Thucydides 150
equals non-transcendent? 26, 99 Tillich, Paul 12, 33
Sedley, David 247 Tolle, Eckhart 18, 207
self-government 1, 2, 29, 85 transcendence 1, 4, 11, see also ascent
failure in 132 in humanism and philosophy 101–2
not self-centered 31 immanence united with 4
separation and 3 rational 1, 79
selfishness through innerness 11
going beyond 2 true 11, 13, 25, 26, 32–3, 50
self-preservation
going beyond 22 unity
self-reliance 30 as ourselves 1
Sellars, Wilfrid 5, 53, 123 through rational activity 3
compared to Plato and Hegel 54 with God 23
normativity and natural laws 53–5
why be moral 53–4 value 2
why truth and science 54 fact and 2, 23, 24, 64
separation 23, 32 fact reconciled with 23
self-government and 3 Vedanta 103
Socrates goes beyond 35 Advaita 103
Shakespeare, William 157 Dvaita 103
Shaw, George Bernard 98 Vlastos, Gregory 4, 27, 118, 176
Shear, Jonathan 249 Voltaire 37
Sheffield, Frisbee 163
Skinner, B. F. 112–14, 236 Weber, Max 23, 55, 157
Socrates 35 Wedgwood, Ralph 150
death of 106–7 Whitehead, Alfred North 5, 7, 12, 19, 20,
mysticism of 241 25, 26, 28, 41–5, 108
Spinoza, Benedict 37, 108 Adventures of Ideas 41
partial Platonism of 225 our identity crisis and 42
spiritual groundedness 83 religion in the making 41, 44
stoicism 30 Science and the Modern World 42
Strauss, Leo 140 Whiting, Jennifer 236
subject Whitman, Walt 39, 66, 206, 212
object and 23–4 Wilber, Ken
reconciled 23, 127 pre/trans fallacy 241
reality and 24, 122 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5, 20, 26, 28
substance dualism in 45
vs. sense perception 123 identity crisis and 47

I ndex   269
 influenced by Schopenhauer 48 Wordsworth, William 28
notebooks 1914–1916 6, 46 world
good life 6 knower and 3, 24
true world among shadows 46 worship
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 45–8, God as deserving 12
108
Wolf, Fred Alan 98 you
Wollstonecraft, Mary 139 me reconciled with 23
Women in classical Athens 160
Woolf, Virginia 139 Zaehner, R. C. 102

270   Index