Plato's world of ideas

Read More

"Plato's world of ideas" is, of course, the realm of incorporeal constitutive principles that Plato thought to be more real than the things of sensory experience. He never describes them as existing in a "world" distinct from this world, but passages in his works can be read as suggesting something like that. The Phaedrus speaks of the soul taking flights to "that place beyond the heavens"––topos hyperuranios––where "true being dwells," including "justice, its very self, and likewise temperance, and knowledge, not the knowledge that is neighbor to becoming and varies with the various objects to which we commonly ascribe being, but the veritable knowledge of being that veritably is" (247c-e, trans. R. Hackforth). The allegory of the cave in the Republic creates a sense of two worlds by imagining human beings who are slaves to sensory impressions as prisoners chained in darkness and watching blurry figures dance across a wall. To be truly sapient and behold things as they actually are, the prisoner must free himself and exit the cave. But this story is a series of metaphors, not a cosmological description.

Considerably looser echoes of Platonism can be heard in a favorite phrase of Russell's, "formless spiritual essences." Gifford quotes a passage from the artist's essay Religion and Love (1904): "Spirituality is the power of apprehending formless spiritual essences, of seeing the eternal in the transitory, and in the things which are seen the unseen things of which they are the shadow." This sounds as much Theosophical as Platonic, and there is great irony in calling the Ideas "formless," because eidos, a term that Plato uses synonymously and interchangeably with idea, means "visible form." (The root eido means "to look," and the English word "eidetic" refers to mental images that are so vividly detailed that they seem actually visible.) Eidos is form, shape, figure––literally, the look of something––and Plato uses it in much the same way that Aristotle uses a closely related word for form, morphe. Calling the Platonic Ideas formless is absurd, then––equivalent to saying "Forms without form." (Only in the last hundred years have English translators begun to replace Idea with Form, so whether Joyce was aware of this irony is open to question.)

In rejecting Russell's freefloating spirituality Stephen is not exactly disagreeing with Plato. Several paragraphs later in Scylla, however, the discussion comes closer to something that the philosopher actually wrote. John Eglinton listens to Stephen and exclaims, "Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato." Stephen replies, "Which of the two...would have banished me from his commonwealth?" It was Plato who did this in book 10 of the Republic, arguing that representational arts like painting and poetry should be banned in the ideal society because they mistake sensory reality for truth and excite passions that should be restrained. Aristotle answered these charges in the Poetics, arguing that literary fictions represent particular events in such a way that universal truths can be seen in them, and arouses passions in such a way as to effect emotional catharsis.

This debate about the value of art is never discussed in Ulysses, but it is relevant to Stephen's talk. His deep dive into Shakespeare's home life expresses a belief that real events are essential to artistic projects and can beget universal insights: "He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed." Shakespeare's sexual life may have been as messy and uncertain as any other mortal's, but by writing about it so brilliantly he revealed "laws" of human psychology. In contrast, Russell opines that lived experience, with all its richness of sensation and feeling, has little to do with great art: "Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l'Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet's drinking, the poet's debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal."

Russell cites three more examples of such transcendent art: "The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas." Moreau, a French Symbolist painter of the second half of the 19th century, was highly esteemed by the fin-de-siècle aesthetes of the 1890s. His paintings often contain surreal and even hallucinatory details. The Apparition, shown here, distances viewers from the familiar biblical tale of Salome and Herod by representing a dreamlike vision of John the Baptist's severed head rather than the real thing. Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote about visions of intellectual or spiritual reality within or behind the visible world, has often been called the most Platonic of the Romantic poets.

As for Hamlet, Russell presumably is referring to soliloquies like "To be or not to be" in which the prince reflects on divine purposes and the afterlife. Stephen retorts that Aristotle "would find Hamlet's musings about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's." Gifford supposes that the Platonic reference here may be to the myth of Er at the end of the Republic, which represents dead souls deciding what forms to take in their next reincarnations. Like Hamlet, who asks whether death will free him of "the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to," Odysseus is represented in Plato's myth as seeking a humble new life in which he will be free of "cares."

Aristotle did not believe in a personal afterlife. In De Anima 3.5 he argues that human thinking ceases when the body dies. All that survives death is the "active" force in intellection, which is incorporeal, immortal, and outside of time, "a sort of positive state like light." This entity acts upon corporeal faculties to produce thought but it is in no way contained within them. It strongly resembles God, the "unmoved mover," as Aristotle describes that impersonal entity in the Metaphysics.