readoldthings

This post was inspired by a comment at John Michael Greer's blog. The commentator pointed to a new book entitled Music to Raise the Dead, and shared the following quote:

It seems like an unfair battle. How can music ever be more powerful than logic? But Plato—and the other leading ancients who laid the groundwork for our rational and algorithmic society—feared music for a good reason. They saw the hypnotic effect of the epic and lyric singers on the masses. For centuries, people learned life skills from songs. They preserved history, culture, and the entire mythos with songs. They tapped into their own deepest emotions with songs. They celebrated every life milestone and ritual with songs. They reached out to the gods themselves with songs. Above all, they used this music to secure personal autonomy and what today we would call human rights. So we should not be surprised that Plato, Aristotle and the other originators of Western rationalism had to displace this dominant worldview of their ancestors—mythic, magical, musical—in order for them to create a more rigorous, disciplined, and analytical society.

This is not the first time I've encountered this idea lately. In an interview here, an Eastern Orthodox bishop criticizes the Western phlosophical tradition for being "rationalist," and claims that that rationalism is rooted in Ancient Greek philosophy. A new book by the author Peter Mark Adams discusses the survival of Proclean Neoplatonism in Christianity, but the author insists of separating Proclus from Plato, who he also seems to consider a kind of rationalist, or a philosopher in the modern sense of "university employee who writes about stuff." (Yes, that's me arguing with him in the comments.)

So we see that this idea is pervasive. And it's also completely wrong.

To say it as simply as I can:

The only way to read Plato as a rationalist is never to have read him at all.

Plato, Music, and Madness

And that goes double for the idea that he was "fearful of the power of music." The importance and power of music features prominently in many of Plato's dialogues. The Philosopher-King in the Republic, who is intended as the model for every complete human being, is to be trained successively in arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. And this in turn is because "music" isn't simply something we enjoy, it's built into the structure of the Cosmos itself. That's very far from "fearing the power of music"!

Now, one could still make the case that this is a kind of rationalist sequence, since the same structures underlying arithmetic and geometry also give rise to musical harmony and then to the locations of the planets in the Solar System. But this is also incorrect, for three reasons: First, in Platonic thought the highest part of the soul, the nous, is *above* the reasoning mind, not identical to it. Second, many of Plato's shorter dialogues specifically point to the failure of rationalism. This is what is happening when, in dialogues like Euthyphro, Laches, Lyses or Charmides, Socrates's debating partners/victims find that they are unable to explain what they mean with common words like piety, courage, temperance or friendship.

Third and very importantly, several of Plato's most important works specifically celebrate the mystical and non-rational. In Phaedrus in particular, the question arises as to whether madness, which is the most non-rational state imaginable, is always a bad thing. Socrates answers that it is not, because there are at least four forms of madness that come to us directly from the gods. These are prophetic madness, during which the gods speak directly through oracles; "telistic" madness, which is a form of divine purification and can include such altogether anti-rational activities as the Bacchic ecstasies; and the madness of erotic love, which, properly directed, can lead the lover upward toward union with the Divine. Finally, the fourth form of madness is poetic madness. In this form of madness, the poet is possessed by the Muses, and it is only through this Musical possession that one can write poetry, or at least, GOOD poetry! It's hard to imagine anything less rationalist than that.

...Unless maybe it's this statement from Socrates, later in the dialogue:

...the priests of the temple of Zeus at Dodona say that the first prophecies were the words of an oak. Everyone who lived at that time, not being as wise as you young ones are today, found it rewarding enough in their simplicity to listen to an oak or even a stone, so long as it was telling the truth...

These days, those are the sorts of words that one expects to find in a New Age bookshop, or perhaps in an anthology on Native American or Ancient Celtic spirituality-- the sort that opens with a long chapter explaining the difference between this worldview and our own rational, disenchanted way of looking a things. It's certainly not something you expect to see in one of the most important works of one of the supposedly-rationalist philosophers who gave rise to our supposedly-rationalist civilization. But there it is.

Disenchantment and the Western Mind

All of this is important for another reason, and it directly relates to something else that our preceptor Mr. Greer has been discussing, which is the idea of the disenchantment of the world.

"The disenchantment of the world" is a concept which originates a century ago in a sociologist named Max Weber. Weber claimed that, whereas primitive people had seen the world as alive, filled with spiritual beings and the possibility of magic, we moderns know better. It's very sad in a way, because the old worldview was nice, but it was also wrong, and now that we've outgrown it we're finally able to make things like medicine and trains and widgets.

In the intervening century, many authors have built on Weber. And one of the very common ways that ideas evolve in human history is that they are taken up in their entirety, but the terms are reversed. The classic example of this is the "Objectivist" philosophy of Ayn Rand. Rand swallowed hook, line, and sinker every Communist claim about the greed and selfishness inherent in Western capitalism, and then turned around and said "...But that's a good thing!"

In a similar way, many authors over the last century have believed Weber's claims about the disenchantment of the world, and then gone on to read them back into the entire history of Western civilization, as far as the Ancient Greeks. And then they've turned around and said, "And that's the problem with Western civilization, all this rationalism and disenchantment!" We are then, invariably, treated to a discussion of an another, non-Western worldview, which is fully enchanted, spiritual, mystical, and natural. Sometimes this view is imputed to Native Americans; sometimes to ancient and conveniently extinct peoples, especially Celts; sometimes to mystical traditions from India, China or Japan; sometimes all of the above.

The trouble with this idea is that it is wrong. And it is wrong in both senses of the word, factual and moral. As a factual truth-claim it fails immediately. If you want to understand how wrong it is as a truth claim, consider how many of those great speeches about the sacredness of nature and oneness of all life that were supposedly written by Native Americans, ancient Celts, ancient Egyptians or whathaveyou were actually written by modern urban Americans.

This we know: the Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

This was supposedly written by Chief Seattle in a letter to President Franklin Pierce in the 1850s. In reality, it was written by an unknown American environmentalist in the 1970s, based on several earlier versions-- all of them written by white people. Don't get me wrong, it's a very fine sentiment, and very true. And also very much a product of the true heritage of Western culture and Western philosophy. The very fact that we find it so moving demonstrates this. We value these words, because they express our values.

And that leads to the second problem with the idea of disenchantment: It leads us to reject our own heritage. This is the sense in which it is not merely factually but morally wrong. Rationalism, insofar as it exists, is not at the heart of our civilization. The Greek philosophers employed reason, but they were not rationalists. The Scholastics of the Middle Ages were not rationalists. Even the founders of the scientific revolution were not rationalists. We have rationalists today, but to be completely honest with you, I'm not sure where they came from; they seem to have turned up all but spontaneously during the Victorian era and back-read their own existence through the whole of Western history.

The problem with the West is not its rationalism, but its belief in its rationalism. We are not really rationalists, and we never have been. For a few centuries we've suffered through the existence of a few rationalists, whose volume was dialed up to 11 in recent decades. But at its core, our heritage is as mystical and as enchanted and as spiritual as any other. While we can look to Native American or Far Eastern teachers for spiritual direction if we choose to, we don't have to; we have all the resources we need within our own heritage and our own history. Plato employs reason, but he also rises above it, and he calls all of us to do so as well. This is the real heart of our common Western heritage. Don't reject it, embrace it.