Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism

it is the Italian Renaissance period of Italy and we are in realm and these are the years that Michelangelo is painting the Sistine Chapel the four years that it took him to painted were an extraordinary time of artistic output well in a nearby room for two years Raphael another one of the great painters of the Renaissance was hard at work on his school of Athens and the School of Athens is situated in one room that actually depicts four of Raphael's frescoes but by far the most important work the most well known work of this room of Raphael's is the School of Athens and in it is depicted just about every philosopher and sculptor an artist and thinker of the Greek world that Raphael and others in the Renaissance had come to cherish we see figures like Zeno the founder of stoicism Heraclitus and others but situated right in the middle at the vanishing point of the painting are the two most important thinkers in Greek philosophy on the left is Plato the Plato by all accounts is the founder of what we today call philosophy without Plato there really is nothing like philosophy in its modern form and as one 20th century philosopher put it all of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato and standing right next to him the two seemingly locked in a discussion or even a debate and an argument is Aristotle a contemporary of Plato's who child's play those ideas of what is real and what is true and one of the things that students of this painting have noticed is that all of these subjects that were used to paint these pictures all the models who might say we're actually contemporaries of Raphael Plato himself as a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci with his long flowing beard and wise and face da Vinci was by many in the Renaissance considered to be the most important figure the figure of Aristotle is painted to look like Giuliano de Sangalo a popular sculptor and architect and figure in the Renaissance down at the bottom brooding seemingly anti-social is Michelangelo and Michelangelo was known to be this kind of character he was a bit standoffish he was a bit of a curmudgeon and so Raphael captures a bit of Michelangelo's personality by having him brewed down on the steps down below and over on the right is the figure of a palace Annapolis was the Greek painter who had painted Alexander the great picture that is now largely destroyed but which still shows Alexander on his horse during battle and the subject for this with a little bit of vanity is Raphael himself they are in the picture down on the right well the importance for this picture now is standing in the interesting portraits that Raphael includes does not polite of act that when it comes to philosophy they're in the middle of the portrait Raphael has captured in the gestures of Plato and Aristotle the primary difference between their understanding of reality notice plato's hand pointing to the sky as if to say that truth is somehow not in this world that there is an abstract truth that is somewhere outside of the world outside of our sensory perceptions and for Plato the goal of philosophy was to contemplatively ascertain and meditate on this abstract rational logical reality that cuts against the grain of our sensory perceptions which could obscure truth or even lead us into falsehood next home is Aristotle however pointing down into the world and Raphael is signaling one of the primary critiques that Aristotle has of Plato which is that Aristotle does not like the fact that Plato has constructed a concept of reality that does not connect to this world in any specific way Aristotle is unhappy being a bit of a naturalist with the idea that all that we observe and all that we perceive in this world is somehow a phantom or somehow misleading and that our senses our interactions with the material world are somehow incapable of achieving a solid grasp of truth and so their gestures indicate their philosophies Plato an abstracted concept of the rational world that is not part of this world and Aristotle pointing to this world saying that truth must be found within this world and so in this lecture we're going to look at pagan philosophy and in particular we're going to focus on the issue of how do we ascertain truth what is the true world how do we discover truth and as we'll see in Greek and later Roman philosophy the goal of discovering truth led them to some conclusions in particular with Plato but later with Aristotle that create a worldview or a picture of the ways in which humans must engage with the world around it and so we'll extrapolate these ideas and we'll discuss them in general so that we have a grasp of the alternative to Roman pagan cultic worship and we'll explore the issue of how these ideas began to shape and come into and in some ways be rejected by the early Christian Church now in just this short lecture we're not going to be able to cover all of the intricacies of the philosophy of Plato Aristotle and of the Stoics and really we don't have to one of the things we want to do though is ask the question how did these philosophies address the question of what is real more particularly how do we understand truth how do we come to the knowledge of truth and where is truth located is there a place where we discover it or is it sort of dispersed throughout the world or throughout something else and one more element needs to be addressed here one of the things we're looking at here is how Greek philosophy began to shape the West well simply put when the Romans come on the scene after their rise to power several centuries before the time of Christ the Romans really are not that interested in philosophy there are actually stories of when Rome went to conquer Greece that they found all these philosophers and they actually looked on them with scorn it's a bit like a high school cafeteria really these tough jocks these manly Romans come to Greece and they find all these Poindexter's these geeks these nerds out in Greece just sitting around thinking and talking about their philosophy and by and large the Romans did not take on much of the Platonism or the Aristotelian ism of the Greek world at least not at the level of the populace still there were people in the Senate lurid men who eventually came to appreciate Greek philosophies and so long as the Roman world was united East and West Alexandria and the bastions of philosophy in the east places like Greece and elsewhere always had a chance to influence the Romans at some level so we begin with Plato and Plato's philosophy can really be described as a dualism and a dualism is a philosophy that says essentially that there are two ultimate channels of reality two ultimate places of reality in what dualism tends to do historically is that you separate the real from the unreal you have things in one category that are the most precious things the most true things the best things in philosophy or over here but on the other side there are the things of everyday life the things that we don't take for granted per se but yet which or consider to not be the places of ultimate truth again there are lots of dualisms and philosophy in lots of attempts by philosophers to come up with a system that properly categorizes the best were the truth things from those that are a bit less true and in Plato's mind the ultimate question of reality was that the material world the world around us the world that we sense with our eyes in with our senses is not the ultimate place to discover truth and Plato had a wonderful analogy for this it's the analogy of the cave with the allegory of the cave in which he describes a number of figures sitting in a cave and they have a fire going behind them and as they look onto the cave wall they see these shadows dancing about and since they have no other frame of reference those in the cave believe that the shadows or real things they believe that they are the most important things that the shadow somehow symbolize truth and in the climax of this allegory Plato talks about a number of people who come out from the cave leaving the shadows in the simple fire and they come out into the bright sunlight and suddenly there they realized that there is a brighter Sun a more perfect truth that they had never seen before because they were in the cave and for Plato this symbolizes essentially his entire philosophy of ultimate reality and truth his metaphysics we call it for Plato and he talks about this in particular in his book that Timaeus there are two realms of reality that have to be acknowledged there is he described the world of being and down below the world that you and I inhabit the world were used to day in and day out is the world of becoming now don't stack up too much meaning on these two words just look at them simply being and becoming if something is being if something has substance if its essence is in the top category then that is going to be the most true place where it resides if something is in the state of flux if it is ephemeral if it is in some ways capable of confusing us then Plata will say it's in the world of becoming it is in the world that is in flux in Plato focuses most especially on the world of being that for Plato is the place that philosophers need to spend the most time reflecting on and considering again take the allegory of the cave those who are in the cave or focused on learning truth in this world of becoming in the sensory world they trust what they see they believe that truth is something that we see the real world is something we touch and there is no ultimate reality outside of that for Plato it is the opposite the things we touch the things we see generally are not the most important things but rather they derive their importance by the fact that they are connected to this spiritual world you might say though the Plato would never use the word spiritual it's the world of being it's the world where the essence resides and in this world of being Plato has three categories that he discusses first and foremost he talks about the Demiurge which you can roughly translate to be God though for Plato there is no personal element to this God rather this Creator is some kind of primordial force something that gives shape to ultimate truth and the Demiurge or this god-like figure really doesn't have much to do with our world he never interacts directly with the material world or the world of becoming and out of the Demiurge is created the forms now nuisance of philosophy always might stumble and trip on this word forms because the forms don't really make much sense in terms of the vocabulary of it why would God spend time or the Demiurge spend time creating forms the better word I tend to find for students is to just think of this as ideas in fact the Greek word for form is the same as the word for ideas so it makes perfect sense to say that the dimma age creates the ideas of things now they're not simply ideas they are somehow concrete reality though they are not physical they are immaterial but these ideas that come out of the Demiurge or you might say the perfect essence or the perfect example of the various things you and I experience in the world so let's take for example something as simple as a stone if you were to be walking in the woods and you would discover any number of stones all different shapes all different sizes big large boulders small little pebbles different colors different makeup etc one of the things that animated Plato's philosophy was attempting to understand how it is that we humans come across all of these individual things that seem to have no connection with each other at all and yet we understand them we grasp them as being somehow connected to a greater reality of being a stone we see a small stone we see a large stone we still call it a stone well for Plato the reason why we down in the world of becoming them as being part of something greater part about a larger category is because the demo urge has created these forms or these ideas of what it is to be a perfect stone and so therefore when we come across all of these imperfect small varieties of different stones we somehow almost mystically connect them back to the ultimate reality now mathematical and geometrical forms tend to also help here you can think for example of a perfect circle you can at least envision it even if you've never seen one or a perfect right angle or a perfect triangle well in our world we don't see perfect circles just think of a young child were to draw a circle it would be anything but perfect it would be sort of you know kind of wobbly all along the edges but for Plato when we see even a wobbly lopsided child drawn circle we recognize it as a circle because from the Demiurge up in the world of being there is the idea there is the form of a perfect circle now moving on down the level of being what Plato then begins to say is that there is something one simple of the forms that really is hard to translate some call it the receptacle some call it a bit of a bridge there are lots of different ways of understanding this we're going to go with the word receptacle because it is the one that it's most often used but from the world of ideas to how those things become achievable in real time and space in the world we sense and come across everyday you need something that is going to bridge that and the receptacle is what this is it is something that begins to sort of drive the forms or the ideas into specific time and space okay so let's pull the lens back so we've looked at Plato's sort of dualism and we've also looked at his idea of the forms or of the ideas that were created by the Demiurge and we can say just a couple things about it run off the bat of course we've already noted that this is a dualism but one of the things that's troubling about this philosophy one of the things that is challenging about this philosophy is that it treats the material world rather poorly and this of course is not the in view of the material world the material world is not some kind of cave that is striking us at with all these bombarding ideas that are false but we can think of for example John Calvin who described creation as the theater of God's glory as the place where God is very intimately engaged now I'm not faulting Plato for not being a Christian of course I don't expect him to be but engaging it from the vantage point of theology you can see that there are some problems here still over the centuries of the church all down even until today there have been a number of theologians who have found in Plato some very intriguing concepts for relating the way God has things perfectly in his mind and the way things are imperfectly at times realized in the world around us in other words Plato's theory of knowledge we call it his epistemology the way that he talks about understanding the difference between an absolute truth and the experience of the things down here in the world has had some appeal for Christians now later Christian plate inist s' will not talk about a dem I urge and they will not speak evilly of the material world in general though some will kind of diminish its value in some places and that's a problem but Christian politeness over the centuries as they've interacted with Plato himself or other versions of platonism have tended to see that the world of the forms or the world the ideas are somehow connected to the mind of God that God in his mind has perfect reality has perfect things understood and that he he has created things like ultimate truth and the abstract realities of philosophy and so therefore Christian Platonism has always had some sort of a lure to this but one of the major problems with platonism on its own two feet is that Platonism can't really account for how the ultimate reality the world of being ever really connects or creates or gives rise to the material world at some point of fact Platonism does sort of devolve into mysticism that these things just somehow came into being even the concept of the receptacle seems the sort suggests that there's something there's some spiritual force kind of driving the ultimate reality down into our world that we experience well that critique that the dualism of Plato is too harsh that ultimate reality if it is merely abstract doesn't really give anything for us to sense here in this world well that critique is just the critique that Aristotle gives Aristotle of course was a bit of a scientist in the modern sense he loved to study the natural world he loved to look at the natural world and learn things from it and try to ascertain the the physical world and the way that it's all held together an Aristotle's critique of Platonism really kind of turns Platonism on its head or at least attempts to merge the dualism together Aristotle's concept starts again with some godlike figure a creature that eventually becomes called the unmoved mover some have generally connected what Aristotle is saying here about a god-like figure with the idea of a divine watchmaker who sort of wins the world up and get sets the world off and gets it going and then just kind of watches the beautiful creation the mechanisms churn and spin and work in their own design now Aristotle is not thinking mechanically here he is thinking rather in terms of philosophical categories that at some point there has to be someone who is unmoved that is to say not acted upon by an outside force but yet is the force that is driving all of creation and all of life as we know it and for Aristotle that is essentially God now the big change that Aristotle gives to the Platonic system is he says that the forms or the ideas are not located in an abstract world but rather they are lodged I might say or they are implanted in the specific things of the world as we come across them so let's go back to that idea of stones that we are seeing as we're walking through the forest so I pick up a pebble well in that pebble Aristotle will challenge Plato there has to be something real in it it can't be that our mind is the only link between this pebble and something that is sort of the concept of what a rock or a stone is for Arizona this makes no sense that makes us sort of godlike we're the ones who connect things and Aristotle knew that if it's only our minds that connect these two things well that's a problem because at some point our minds can deceive us no for Aristotle when you pick up that pebble or you see that Boulder on the side of the road what you are seeing and what you're experiencing is something of the ultimate reality because that ultimate reality is within it now a great way of remembering this for students who are new to these ideas and these concepts is to go back to the raphael portrait of the school of athens again notice the hands plato pointing to the sky pointing up seems to suggest that ultimate reality is abstract that it's not of this world that the ultimate reality of things is outside of this world now notice air settles hands pointing down the world no he says to Plato as they are arguing the real things are lodged in specific things and so you see almost a microcosm here of the great debate between the Aristotelian system and the Platonic system now there is a third philosophy that has to be appreciated as well coming from the Greek world not because it dominated the Greeks so much as it would later come to really influence the Romans in that philosophy is stoicism stoicism was generally started by the philosopher Zeno and of course we know this word we used this word today if I were to say that someone was being very stoic I would mean by that that the person was very unemotional very stone-faced very straightforward not hot-blooded or cold-blooded just very very stable in a way that does epitomize the stoic philosophy but it doesn't encapsulate all of it the stoic philosophy begins again with the idea of a creator only in this case the creator is the logos the rational mind of some creator being that gives rise to the world around us now later Christian philosophers in Jewish philosophers such as Philo would later describe God himself as the law Gauss and of course Christian philosophy does describe Christ as a lagos now we don't want to say just simply because they use the same word that they mean the same thing that would be a mistake rather we have to get behind this word Lagos and determine what the Stoics meant by it for the stoic the Lagos was the determiner of some kind of logical order or plan for the world in some ways Stoics are deterministic that there's almost this sense of sort of hyper Providence hyper fatalism of the idea that all things are always determined from the beginning in a mechanistic sense now this again this is not the Christian doctrine of Providence or of God's determining things that shall come to pass that has in mind the idea that God is sovereign and that he is a personal Creator God who is at work at all times and very much involved with his creation and so if you look at it from the stoic side this determinism this logical rational order left them feeling very passive at least at the ultimate sentence now the stoic philosophy does come about during a time of pessimism in the Greek world so there are some explaining it based on the circumstances of the rise of stoicism but the stoic believe that because the log or the rational creator has predetermined in a fatalistic sense all things that shall come to pass all orders of society all ranks etc that the goal of the person of the philosopher of the wise one is not to try to fight against it rather the philosopher is to simply accept the rank and the order of the things that have been given to you if you are born a farmer or if you were born a noble person well that is your rank that was predetermined there's a fatalism there your job is not to seek something better or to seek something different but rather to maintain virtue in the place where you are and so the Stokes would also say that they want to be apathetic now that word has a bad connotation in modern English to be apathetic is to be sort of cynical and completely emotionless almost psychopathic but that's not what the Stoics mean when they say apathetic they mean even keel or stoic in the word we use today that a person who has a deep philosophical understanding of the law Gauss creator and what their fate might be isn't tossed about by emotionalism isn't striving for something different or better in their life they just accept where they are and where they are wherever they might be they seek after virtue now immediately you can see why the Romans are going to like this it has a certain fixed order the Romans very much like stoicism when it involves other people when they can impose order on those tribes that they have conquered they can say look this is your lot in life this is your fate and by the way it is our fate to conquer you you're welcome but the reality of it is for the stoic one's job is to seek virtue in the space where you live in the context we live in the order of the rank where you are do not seek improvement do not seek material advantage don't seek to go above your rank and don't be tossed about by pessimism and therefore denigrate yourself and lower who you are the goal of the stoic is to be aa pathetic to not be hot-headed to not be blue and cast down and depressed because of the fates that have been assigned to you for the stoic the goal of life is always to seek virtue and understand that the law Gauss has decreed what shall happen in the end when we look at all these philosophies we can see some of the things that in later centuries all the way throughout the entirety of church history that would attract certain Christian theologians to elements of these philosophies we can at almost any given generation any given century of the Christian Church find Christian politeness Christian Aristotelian 's and Christian Stokes now it is not the case that Christians who are influenced by say stoicism or who are influenced by Platonism have somehow given up the ghosts of their Christian theology and sold the family farm and left everything behind and our pagan influence beyond a shadow of a doubt therefore do not love Lord but rather all Christians wrestle with the concepts of philosophy and the age they live in we really can't fault them for at least seeking to understand some parts of epistemology or knowledge or philosophy in general therefore there will always be and there have always been Christians who want to engage philosophically we don't need to be scared of this we do have to be on guard in some places though because at times philosophies do sometimes take over their hosts worldview and just because you dabble in platonic descriptions of things or just because you talk about Platonism in a positive sense or to use elements of stoicism to talk about being virtuous in these kinds of things doesn't mean necessarily that you are on the right path in every case rather we have to be on guard for this because simply put there have been theologians who have gone to for in adopting philosophies that are frankly alien to the Jewish way of thinking in the Bible and so as we look at these philosophies and as we sort of grasp the essence of their understanding of truth and knowledge and reality we can understand and look down the corridor as we go into the early part of the centuries of the church and understand just what it is that attracts some Christians to these ideas while on the other hand notice that there are some problems built into them and those Christians who spend too long in philosophy and too little in the scriptures will end up finding themselves pretty out of joint when it comes to authentic Christian theology

Channel: Ryan Reeves

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Keywords: Plato (Author), Aristotle (Author), Paganism (Religion), Stoicism (School Of Thought), Zeno Of Elea (Philosopher), Church History, Stoicism (Literature Subject), Early Christianity (Literature Subject), Roman Empire (Country), Roman Republic (Country), Religion in Ancient Rome, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ancient Rome (Film Subject), Ancient Greece (Literature Subject), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Ryan M. Reeves

Id: a5_V00sevog

Length: 29min 9sec (1749 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 02 2014