Plato's World View

The nature of the Platonic view of the world is to be an outlook in which concrete instances, whether they be things, events or situations or whatever, are seen as in the deepest sense parasitic upon what may be called ‘Ideal Contents’, and not as is commonly thought, vice versa.  It is, further, a view in which such Ideal Contents form an integrated Order, ranging from Contents of the most generic to the most highly specific, arranged according to affinities, distances and dependencies which spring wholly from what they are, and could not any point be otherwise.  All these Ideal Contents and all their ideal relations are such as to reveal themselves perspicuously to a thought which looks for them in the right manner, though they are not in any sense constituted by or for such a thought (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 351).

 

What is essential to the great Platonic revolution is not the erection of predicates into a new sort of logical subjects, though we may seek to express it by doing just this: it is rather the recognition that predicates, senses, universals are the primary stuff, if one may so put it, of experience and reality, that so-called particulars are as such unidentifiable and undiscoverable, their whole being consisting, if one may so phrase it, in instantiating Natures or in having things said of them (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 355).

Platonism and the Mechanical Picture of Human Agency

If, per impossible, the mechanistic views of a barbarized science should turn out to be the provable truth of things, this would be a truth by which we, as practical, inventive, value- and pattern-oriented beings, could not live, and on which we should have, in all but the lowest instrumentalities, to turn our backs.  Truth of this type would neither be worth knowing or applying, and the suasions of a Nocturnal Council might not be too much in order to secure its suppression. These suggestions need not, however, be taken too seriously.  For the science which sees all things in terms of manipulative mechanisms is arguably the product of a transient manipulative phase of human society, which, even as we think and write, is busily in process of destroying itself, and creating an order in which the unified and the purposive will have as irreducible and as firm a place as the mechanically conditioned and the manipulable. In the infinitely well-ordered, stably progressive societies of the future, something like Platonism may well dominate science and practice, and the figure of Plato, with his index finger pointing skywards, and the Timaeus under his arm, may very well occupy the same central place that he takes up in Raphael's Schools of Athens (Plato, The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 412).  

Aristotle's Limitations

If we are to regret anything in Aristotle, it lies in his willingness to remain contented with an enumeration of separate concepts and principles and not to press onwards to the highest conceptual integrations.  It is this stopping short at a list that makes him into a clipped, truncated, dismembered Platonist, with a queer desire to parade instantialist convictions with which he is not deeply in accord, even if superb PLatonic insights are always shining forth in his writings (Plato, The Written and the Unwritten Doctrines, p. 366).

The Platonic God

And Platonism, despite surface-semblances to the contrary, is in fact the only philosophy tailored to fit the Judaeo-Christian religious need for a unique, single, absolutely surpassing, all-disposing source of everything. For an instantial God, even if emptily said to have made Heaven and Earth and Man out of nothing and even if expressing His being in the superb blankness of ‘I am that I am,’ will always remain one among others, a particular being jealous of possible rivals, who might very well not have existed, and exhibiting a particularity in his disposition…There can indeed be nothing sacrosanct about any particular…God, in short, to deserve the self-prostration accorded for Him by the Jews, or the unreserved love demanded for Him by Jesus, would have to be, not a particular case of Justice, or Understanding, or Power or Beauty etc. by Justice itself, the Understanding itself, the infinite Might and Loveliness etc. which are necessarily unique and surpassing, in that they are of a different logical type from their parasitic instances…True religion, it may be argued, is the logical passion par excellence, and the logical pattern into which it breathes that passion tends to have a Platonic tinge (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 378-80).