Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics logic of desire: Aquinas on emotion

8. Gods, God, and Goodness

213 8 Gods, God, and Goodness According to Aristotle’s pupil and successor Theophrastus, Plato proposed two causes of the physical universe: an all-receiving substrate and a moving cause that he “clothes with the power of God and the Good” (fr. 9, in Diels, Doxographi Graeci). Or is it of God, i.e., the Good? Aristotle himself, in the Metaphysics, also attributes two first principles to Plato, the One and the Dyad (A. 988a9ff.), but these sound to be metaphysical, rather than physical, and remind us of the limit and unlimited of the Philebus. Aristotle’s account seems radically different from that of Theophrastus, who clearly identifies a moving (or efficient) cause. Aristotle appears not to do so, and even to imply—against the evidence of all Plato’s later dialogues, many of which he knew well and cited regularly—that Plato had nothing to say about efficient causes, or perhaps that he somehow subsumed efficient causes under formal causes. Thus Aristotle’s version of Platonic metaphysic seems to leap from the Socrates of the Phaedo to what he calls the “unwritten doctrines,” in which theories about the One and the indefinite Dyad are expounded. I will argue that all this is relevant to the final relationship in Plato between God (or gods) and the Good and the Forms, but in order to make sense of it, we must return to the religion of Socrates, then to the more philosophical “theology” of Plato. 214 Gods, God, and Goodness Socrates, we noted, was a religious man, claiming to obey a certain divine admonition if he was at risk of going off the moral rails. His pursuit of wisdom in Athens was, he insisted, to test and understand the response of Delphic Apollo—that he was the wisest of the Greeks. He would obey the commands of God rather than the laws of Athens if the laws commanded him to do what he judged impious . He believed that he had been providentially sent to arouse his countrymen out of their intellectual and moral slumbers. His piety, however, was unconventional; he held, contrary to much traditional belief, that the gods were the source only of good. In the Theaetetus Plato’s “reconstructed” Socrates urges that it is morally and intellectually disreputable to accept from Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. And although the refutation of Protagoras takes the form of a rejection of the individualist interpretation of Protagorean ideas, according to which each individual determines what is right for him- or herself, Plato would surely have had little time for the more “respectable” version whereby morality is conventionally constructed by different societies or by humanity as a whole. He holds, in fact, both that morality is objective—in the sense that we recognize it with our minds rather than with our feelings —and that that objectivity inheres in moral and religious laws that none of us, high or low, few or many, can invent. For Socrates, to pursue such objective morality, with the aim of making our souls better, is the most important goal in life, overriding all other goals. As presented by Plato—and much of the picture is corroborated from other sources—Socrates held both that revenge is impious, in that it involves the ungodly activity of returning evil for evil, and that the gift of philosophical wisdom enables us to eliminate the moral mistakes we constantly make. His claim that no man sins willingly depends on the belief that we are all born with the single moral capacity to seek what is good and true. Our problems arise through some kind of miscalculation as to what really is good for us, and also, therefore, about what is good and fine (kalon) in itself. It is likely that much of this portrait is historical; many such Socratic 215 views reappear, though sometimes transformed, at every stage of Plato’s career. However, there remains a gap between what the historical Socrates—and/or the Socrates of the earlier dialogues—thought and Plato’s mature views about religion. Socrates had progressed as far as he had without benefit of the Theory of Forms; Plato was convinced that much of the moral edifice—even perhaps of the religious edifice—that Socrates had established would collapse if that theory were to be defeated. If the Platonic Socrates lives in hope, Plato himself wants to insert a strictly philosophical underpinning...