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Platonic Era Outcroppings

In his treatise, The Republic, Plato reasoned through the voice of Socrates that the ultimate form of Good, or highest reality, must “exist” if it is to mean anything at all; and to meet the requirement of perfection, it must exist forever without change.  He postulated that a flower, for example, that is here today and gone tomorrow cannot qualify as the "highest" reality, nor can even a mountain or river that might remain stable for thousands or millions of years, but eventually dissolve into nothing.  This is because at some point if it does not still exist unchanged then it could not have been the ultimate reality after all.

The Gnostics adapted a symbol to represent their view of the cosmos: a circle surrounding a point in the center.  The circle was meant to depict the constant change in the world around us, bound in its orbit by an independent self-sufficient, unchanging reality lying within.

There are many interesting things about this choice.  First, was the use of a circle itself: demonstrating “motion round same” rather than random unconstrained motion.  So here we have constant motion (unlimited variation), but in a limited “changeless” manner.

Remember I mentioned the fact that everything around us is built upon only three tiny particles??  Nature is replete with such patterns.  Snowflakes that are each unique in the whole, while all of them are six-sided.  Insects with six legs each, and arachnids with eight.  Diversity founded on features similar enough we can divide everything into its own class and genus before coming down to a species.  Perhaps we could compare this idea to a set of blocks with different colored sides; depending on which side of each is turned up we can obtain thousands of variations with a far fewer number of blocks.  This aspect of nature has always intrigued me...the similarity of patterns behind infinite variation.  And it did not escape the attention of Hellenistic thinkers either.

The other thing to notice is that Plato found nothing in this world that was unchanging, so the dot in the middle was separated from the world of motion, and yet served to hold it in place, just as gravity holds the orbiting planets in our solar system.  Or like the nuclear and electromagnetic forces that hold the atom together.  The correspondence here, I believe, is no accident.  But the problem with this is that it has led to the notion that this reality is “way out there somewhere”, forming the basis for the transcendental aspect of their view of of the Highest Good.

But Plato missed something, in my opinion.

If one takes a living plant or animal apart piece by piece, laying all the parts out on a table – down to the individual particles of each of its atoms – and does the same with an identical dead one, they will find that all the bits of each of them are the same.  But we know there is something that makes one alive while the other is not.  The whole is obviously more than the sum of the parts here.  Ancient philosophers called this non-physical aspect the “essence” of that living thing.

More importantly, however, is that while the external structure of that living plant or animal undergoes constant change as it grows, one can speculate that the lifeforce within it does not, because it is not something physical, but rather a real and yet intangible quality which is beyond the reach of our limited senses.  A tiny spork of something that is infinite and changeless??  Like Plato's Highest Good??

And if some portion of this ultimate reality is within each of us - and indeed, everything around us (even rocks contain energy in the amount of e = mc^2, which might be considered an unconscious lifeforce) - then we are led to what is called the immanent (i.e. “in our midst”, as opposed to the transcendent “out there”) aspect of this Highest Good. 

This aspect is well known to the western religions, but is not emphasized because it does not fit well into their dogma.  In fact, when their messiah was claimed to have said “I and my father are one”, the apostles jumped to the conclusion that this applied only to him and they created a whole new religion around it - despite the fact that thousands of ancient Hindu sages had taught for centuries that this is true of all things.

Not so with the eastern religions. This understanding of our true nature is, for example, the reason why Buddhists point to everything around them and state “that is the buddha”.

If we decide that this lifeforce is identical to the Highest Good, and that this same eternal unchanging essence occupies everything in the universe, even while expressing itself in separate physical bodies, then we have found what we have been looking for - something that connects all the objects we see as being separate around us into what is actually one thing in a higher dimension.

But let us consider this idea a bit further to see if it makes sense.

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This page was last updated on February 12, 2023

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The Republic by Plato       (back to text)

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