ROBERT S. BR MB.AUGH

PLATONIC POSSIBILlTY:ETERNAL OBJECTS ANO THE MYTH OF ER

The purpose of the present paper is to suggest that a c1arification of the-status of the "paradigms of lives" in Republic ;t" may oííer contemporary Platonisma position which meets A. N. Whitehead's demands for creativity and openpossibility, without the drastic metaphysical reversaI he himself recomrnends ,

The probIem is that 0f the moda lit y of the íorms . Whitehead argue thatif we take the middle dialogues as our statement of Platonism, al! value andactuality are given to the form, and all actual causality also is formal. The formsare determinate and eternaI; and there seerns no escape from a limitation of realexistence to the repetition oí prefigured patterns: these timeless actualities, if theyembody all actual value, leave no room for the creation oí something both newand valuable. And yet one of the most evident anel intrusive facts of our experience·is that the events and occasions we encounter are unique; we finel concrete-reiteratiosi but never repetition; it is a series oí variations 011 a therne, not amonotonous eternal re-playing of it note for note that we encounter. Further,the future (whether we judge it by direct inspection, or by anaIysis after it hasbecome past) eloes contain novelty, predictabIe perhaps in broad outline, but neverin full concrete detail. Artistic creation and evolution are taken as paradigmcases oí the "concrescence" in which such novelty occurs .

For Whitehead, the aelaptation needed to do justice to this aspect oí ourexperience is to reinterpret the forms as "eternal objects" which exist only aspossibility, and in their own nature have no value . Value comes from the ingres-sion of cornplex "eternal objects" into space and time concreteness. We thus.find the weakening of form from the modality of actuality to that of possibility,and the strengthening of physical existence from the modality of potential reali-zation to actualization.

The elifficulty with Whiteheael's position appears to be, that all oí 01.11"-

norms of ethics, logic, and law, being "abstract", are only possible, not actual;and are in themselves incapable oí being evaluated except by aesthetic apprehensionof their concrete instantializations. There is no coercive or objetive categoricalimperative; instead, we hope that vision ancl sensitivity will create by progressive·choice a persuasion by reason of necessity. But it is, it seerns, a rather wistfuland long-range hope ; taking the beautiful rather than the true or the good as the-central concept, we have an ideal of harmony which excludes nothing, butcomprehends everything in the vision oí a beautiíul organic work oí art . Intel-lectual analysis is remote enough from concrete apprehension to create a doubt.as to its adequacy to discover, predict, or recognize absolute conditions oí value .

And yet, the main strength of the Platonic traclition has seemed to manyof its admirers to be that there are objective and actual icleals which serve ascriteria of the just and the good. The one thing that must be actual, not merely·

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hypothetical, in Plato's program for dialectic is an objetive criterion of value o Incases of practical choice, there are situations where it seems to us wrong to say"in some sense, both sides are right; in some sense, both incomplete; let us besensitive and tolerant and hope for greater harmony" o On the contrary, in acase such as that oí Eichmanu, there seerns a clear line separating right fromwrong ; not merely a possible line, which a sensitive artist or saint might notice,but a total and' actual difference which requires very modest sensitivity to discern,If we cannot trust our moral sense in such cases, one wonders what ground wehave for trusting in more ambiguous and novel situations to an inner awarenessof positive or negative "value' o The principie of respect for law, for example,is basic to jurisprudence ancl to civilization; disrespect for law is 110t merelya íailure of maximum sensitivity or adaptation in a creative choice, it is a positivedenial and destruction of moral value o Aristotle, more empirical than Plato andless addicted to vision ancl idealization, compromised on the true instead of thegood, but had a principie which was non-hypothetical and intolerant, as thekeystone of his philosophic systern o (So, at least, one can interpret his referenceto the law of contradiction as "anhypotheton") o

On the other hand, the recent findings of science in respect to evolutionand cultural relativity make it almost impossible for us to hold any simple-mindednotion of an ideal plan of life in full concrete detail laid up in heaven, to serve asyardstick of accomplishment for every time and culture o With such a concreteideal, freedom would consist only in choosing whether to be good or bad, with noroom for perplexity .

Now, clearly, that is not our own ethical situation; nor was it even Plato's.In. the Myth of Er, the souls who are to choose their next lives are shown aset of "paradigrns of lives" which are detailed descriptions of the external eventsand circumstances those lives will contain o The paradigms do not indica te thequality of soul of the chooser, but rather the historical role he will play andadventures he will undergo o It is not easy to know which life among these is thebest ; and Socrates recommends to Glaucon the careful study of which patternsoí life will permit the soul to approach 1110Stclosely to full selí-realization o

In the Theaetetus, in the context oí a contrast of philosopher and lawyerstuclded with reminiscenses of the Republic, there is a passage which seems toexplain the choice oí lives in the Myth as allegory , For each man is said to holdbefore hi111 at each moment of his life the paradigm of the role he wishes tobecome ; and cosmic justice operates to make each become in fact the characterthat he has .chosen o The moment of choice and its irrevocability in the Mythseem therefore to represent allegorically decisions which confront each of usconstantly within every incarnation, ami not something to be thought oí literallyas a one-time decision made between lives o N or is it impossible to improve ormodiíy one' s "paradigm", as the result of experience and education o This isclear enough fr0111Odysseu's choice in the Myth of Er o

Read in this way, the "roles" or "paradigrns" have a metaphysical statusrhat is peculiar, and for our present purpose important o First, they are clearlynot the [onn. of 111<1n;cleary not, because (a) they represent an external descrip-tion, not an inner nature; and (b) they differ in value among themselves as meansto an end of ideal selí-realization o Second, once these roles have been written ordesigned, they are evidently abstract and atemporal; the structural description of

..the tyrant's role, like the lines of a play, is an atemporal entity which, becauseit is abstract or dianoetic, can never vary . Third, the existence of the role is

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the resultant of an eternal objective 110rm and a transient human agent, desiringimmortality ancl trying to achieve that clesire by the choice of actions in a theaterof space ancl time, often unaware of the true cause ancl object which makes himclesire anything. Fourth, the apperance of new roles as options for choice, ashistory ancl society advance, must involve a genuine creation of novelty; noancient Greek coulcl have chosen to be an astronaut, however c1ear his vision oícourage and aclventure as values, beca use in his time there existed no spatio-temporal possibility for playing this part. 1 would therefore think, if we takePlato's myth ancl its allegorical sense seriously-more seriously, perhaps, tban itsauthor himself intended-that although the patterns of lives, once they are sketchedout, remain clefinite ancl uncbanged íorever, tbis definiteness applies only tooptions in tbe past; the interaction oí a variable space-time field with invariantideas seems to result in a genuine novelty ancl unpredictable creation of the rolesthat oHer choices for each mornent oí the future. There may be an indeíinitecontinuum, but until a possibility i clistinctly recognizecl, it does not exist a aneternal entity.

Fifth, ancl finally, there is no inconsistency between these roles appearingwith genuine novelty as the result oí creativity and the existence of absoluteobjective stanclarels oí the gooel ancl the true, in respect to which the roles, insofaras they are expressions 01 au inner nature which they project, can be judgedbetter anel worse and given a normative order. It should come as no surpriseto Platonists that the relation of a single objective form to its associated structuresis a one-rnany relation; ancl there is thereíore no ground for denying evolutiorror cultural relativity within a range of relevance set by the forrn .

But if this is so, can one not at the sarne time respect Whitehead's clesirefor recognition of novelty ancl creativity in the universe, ancl yet r etain the Platonicforrn , in its status of ultimate criterion of value, as an actuality? NIy hope 1S,that when we clevise a Platonism in which creativity is given recognition by asatisfactory interpretation of "paradigrns' as relevant possibilities, we \\'i11 findthat we can.