Can Platonism Save Us?

 From The European Conservative:

What, then, is Platonism? The most straightforward answer one might give is that Platonism is the philosophy espoused by Plato, the ancient Greek writer. Gerson would certainly agree that this is a legitimate use of the term, but he goes much farther, arguing that Platonism is ultimately synonymous with philosophy itself.

How could this be? We are used to speaking of many competing ‘philosophies.’ You have your philosophy of life and I have mine, to say nothing of Hegel’s, Heidegger’s, or Aristotle’s. However, as Gerson argues, when looked at in contrast to naturalism, philosophy is naturalism’s opposite, and Platonism is the only form of it that makes no concessions to naturalism. Thus, any position taken in the history of philosophy can be seen as existing somewhere on the spectrum between Platonism and naturalism.

‘Platonism’ is not simply a series of propositions that must be accepted in order to be let into the club of philosophers. Instead, Gerson argues that there are many forms of Platonism, but each one is fundamentally opposed to five ideas. He calls this the five ‘antis’ of Platonism. The five ideas Platonism opposes are materialism, relativism, skepticism, mechanism, and nominalism. Some of these terms are commonplace, but some are unusual outside of the philosophy classroom, so it is worth having at least a basic grasp of each to understand Gerson’s argument better.

Materialism is the belief that matter is the only thing that exists. Mechanism follows materialism, and is also known as ‘materialist (total-) determinism.’ It holds that all things can be explained in terms of natural causes. The mechanist rejects belief in a God who intervenes in the world, as well as any account of life that is not purely the result of the interaction between material things. Crucially, then, mechanism denies any meaningful kind of free agency. Relativism amounts to the claim that there is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ other than the purely subjective preferences of any given person, while skepticism is the belief that objective knowledge is impossible.

The final idea which Platonism opposes, nominalism, is less easily summarized. In its most basic form, it is the claim that any two things we call by the same name do not share a common nature. For instance, just because we use the phrase “human being” to refer to 8 billion items, it does not actually mean that we are all the same kind of thing. Indeed, the nominalist believes that the idea of a ‘kind’ or ‘sort’ or ‘genus’ of thing is something in the mind only and corresponds to nothing out there in the world. (While this may seem quite abstract, think for a moment of some ethical possible implications of the idea that human beings do not share a common nature for debates about issues like abortion and transgenderism.)

With a basic idea of each of the five philosophical claims that all forms of Platonism reject, we can now return to Platonism itself. In opposing these five ideas, each Platonist philosopher constructs his own positive system. These systems tend—generally speaking—to have many things in common (the immortality of the soul, for instance, is present in many formulations of Platonism), but they are distinguished from naturalism by their “five antis,” as Gerson calls them. Because (to take some well-known examples) Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and St. Thomas Aquinas all base their respective systems on the rejection of these five errors, they may each be called ‘Platonists.’

Crucially, Platonism is distinguished from naturalism in holding that philosophy has a distinct subject matter. For the naturalist, ‘philosophy’ is at most a way of explaining of what scientists do. The practices of natural science are what yield understanding of reality, and the reality we know is the physical world. Platonists, on the other hand, believe that man is not limited to the physical world, for we are ultimately made to know that which is most real: the immaterial world. For the committed Platonist, the only way to ensure philosophy’s rightful place and avoid the errors of naturalism is by fully rejecting materialism, relativism, skepticism, mechanism, and nominalism. Rigorously following through this rejection ultimately leads the philosopher to posit the existence of something that is immaterial. Something that serves as the point where the buck stops. Something that makes all knowledge possible. Something all things naturally desire, albeit differently. Something that makes universality possible.

This something is found in Plato’s Idea of the Good. (Read more.)

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