Every time I reread the “Protagoras” or “Meno,” I am surprised anew that a man of Plato’s towering intellect and searing insight into human nature could have been so mistaken about the human propensity to sin and rebellion.
Plato never cared much for the sophists, viewing them as amoral peddlers of a relativistic kind of wisdom with the potential to corrupt the souls of those who hired them. It is therefore not surprising that when they appear in his dialogues, they are generally treated in a negative or at least suspect manner. In Protagoras, however, Plato treats the sophist of the title with considerable respect. He even has Socrates debate with Protagoras—on fairly equal terms!—a two-part question that Plato considered vital: what is the nature of virtue and can it be taught to others? Although the more elitist Socrates begins the dialogue by asserting that virtue cannot be taught, as the dialogue proceeds, he slowly adopts a position concerning the nature of virtue that drives him—almost against his will—toward the necessary conclusion that virtue can be taught.
In striking contrast to the Christian doctrine of original sin, Plato argues in Protagoras—and elsewhere—that human evil is not the result of rebellion or disobedience. Although G. K. Chesterton was certainly right when he claimed that original sin was “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved,” Plato seems to have overlooked this proof in favor of a different cause for vicious behavior. “For myself,” says Socrates, “I am fairly certain that no wise man believes anyone sins willingly or willingly perpetrates any evil or base act. They know very well that all evil or base action is involuntary” (345e). Later in the dialogue, Socrates explains more clearly what the cause is of this involuntary evil:
…when people make a wrong choice of pleasures and pains—that is, of good and evil—the cause of their mistake is lack of knowledge….no one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present course when he might choose the better. To “act beneath yourself” is the result of pure ignorance, to “be your own master” is wisdom. (357e, 358c)
Evil actions, that is to say, are caused not by sin but by ignorance. If we knew of another, better course of action, we would take it.
In Meno, a dialogue that picks up—thematically, at least—exactly where Protagoras leaves off, Socrates is even more bold in his assertions, claiming that 1) “nobody desires what is evil,” 2) “everything that the human spirit undertakes or suffers will lead to happiness when it is guided by wisdom,” and 3) “virtue is wisdom” (78a, 88c, 89a). How wonderful it would be if these assertions were true. Imagine a world in which all who truly understood virtue were thereby empowered to become virtuous. The father need only educate his children well, and he will be guaranteed virtuous progeny. If great teachers could be coaxed to visit prisons and open the eyes of all the murderers and thieves to the way of virtue, the prisons could throw open their gates and let these “reformed” inmates reenter society.
Every time I reread the Protagoras or Meno, I am surprised anew that a man of Plato’s towering intellect and searing insight into human nature could have been so mistaken about the human propensity to sin and rebellion. Luckily for the development of Europe, the dangers inherent in Plato’s big mistake were neutralized for two millennia, partially by the corrections by Aristotle and then fully by the Christian doctrine of original sin, especially as it is developed in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante.
As the late Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, however, a rather unlikely character arose who gave new life to Plato’s belief that knowledge is virtue: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s motivation, of course, for adopting his view of human evil arose from quite a different source than that of Plato. As a pre-Christian thinker, Plato did not place himself in knowing opposition to the doctrine of original sin. Rousseau, on the other hand, as a post-Christian writer, was both conscious and intentional in his rejection of the biblical belief than man is by nature fallen and that his “problem”—that which keeps him from perfecting himself and building a perfect world—is his inborn propensity for sin and disobedience.
For Rousseau, man in his natural state was both free and innocent. It was external social corruption—not an internal state of rebellion—that was holding man back from his full potential. Man is born free, he cried out in the famous opening sentence of The Social Contract, but is everywhere in chains. It is only by throwing off the chains of convention and false hierarchy that man can return to his original state of purity: a state which Rousseau fancied he would find amongst the “noble savages” who lived on distant South Sea Islands and were thus isolated from the corruption of Western civilization. For Rousseau and his heirs the vehicle for freeing humanity from its chains was not so much spiritual as educational. Rousseau, though he would have disagreed with Plato in most other areas, agreed wholeheartedly that ignorance was the cause of most evil and that education was therefore the key to reforming the world.
Beginning with the French Revolution, an event which was inspired in great part by the writings of Rousseau, those who believed that the trouble with man was sin and rebellion would be labeled “conservative,” while those who countered that the problem was ignorance would be labeled “liberals.” What this meant in the practical political sphere is that conservatives were “law and order” rulers who felt the best way to deal with the sinful side of man was to establish social, political, legal, and religious barriers to contain and hem in that sinfulness. Liberals, on the other hand, nurtured a very different vision of government as an engine for the reforming and reshaping of man and society.
Up to this point, Rousseau, and Plato behind him, sounds like the teacher’s best friend. Can there be any nobler goal than that of eradicating ignorance? I know that I was motivated to pursue a career in education by the promise that I could use my gifts to help draw students up to higher levels of understanding and, by so doing, empower them to live lives of greater purpose and virtue. But then, I also knew that this promise was as exciting as it was illusory—that a man with a sixth grade education can be a saint, while a PhD can be both self-centered and immoral. And I knew—or learned—a third thing: that the promise and the illusion can be reconciled. As long as education is viewed within a realistic context of man’s natural propensity to sin, we can pledge ourselves with full gusto to the idealistic goal of moderating (rather than eliminating) the ignorance of that part of humanity which comes within our sphere.
But when the two views—the realistic and the idealistic—are cut off from one another, when society’s “planners” come to believe that they can reeducate all people in accordance with some national or global program, then is the lid of Pandora’s box thrown open wide and the world left prey to the egalitarian demons lurking therein.
Here is how it happens in totalitarian states. The state begins by positing, as both Plato and Rousseau do in slightly different ways, that evil lies outside the individual, rather than within. This gives it the rationale and justification for eliminating that external evil—whether it considers that evil to reside in a social class (the aristocracy or bourgeoisie), an economic group (kulaks or bankers), a political group (communists or fascists), or an ethnic group (the Jews or Armenians). Once it has eliminated the identified group, however, the state—which by now has come to identify itself with God or history or both—finds that there are still a large number of people within society who have been so corrupted by the evil elements that they are themselves a part of the external threat. So the state feels justified in eliminating them as well for the promise that those who remain can be reeducated into pure and perfect citizens is so tantalizing that it alleviates the consciences of those the state appoints to neutralize the threat. If the state and its agents succeed in this double liquidation, then they will be especially careful that those who remain are all educated in the same way, lest new evils spring up and demand a renewed purge of undesirable elements. Besides, any state that sets itself on this path to perfection will, of necessity, be dedicated to order, efficiency, and regimentation—and it will find that the best way to achieve such things is to carefully remove from the people all socioeconomic differences, cultural distinctions, and personal eccentricities. After a while, the state will come truly to believe that only when all are the same will all be truly free. The result is a state that should be—but alas is not—a logical impossibility: a state, that is, that is fully egalitarian and fully totalitarian.
Here is how the same scenario plays out in more democratic states. Being loath to target and eliminate undesirable elements, the more “enlightened” state will seek instead to target and eliminate undesirable ideas. Beginning with the belief that knowledge is virtue, the state will filter this belief through its devotion to liberty, equality, and fraternity so as to come up with three corollaries: that knowledge which unites people should be privileged over that which divides; that educated people, especially those educated in knowledge that unites, should make all the decisions for those who are less educated; that these educated folk should use their position to root out knowledge that divides. It will only be a matter of time before knowledge takes the place of Truth, and Truth becomes defined as that kind of knowledge which promotes what the state believes to be virtue (namely, liberty, equality, and fraternity). Since the state believes that its brand of virtue can be taught, and that people can be changed from within by such teaching, it will declare an intellectual and educational “war” on all ideas that it fears will promote exclusiveness, intolerance, or inequality. It will not rest until all its citizens have learned not only to behave properly but to think and to speak properly as well.
In the former state, those who will not conform are imprisoned or executed; in the latter, they are ostracized, ridiculed, and marginalized. In the one, secret police, paid informers, and brainwashing are used to bring about conformity; in the other, political correctness, media saturation, and multiculturalism are the less violent—though often more effective—tools of choice. In both states, there is a reduction, a diminution of the true human spirit of diversity and creativity. Each state, in its own way, believes that man can be reprogrammed and reshaped into a newer and better humanity; each feels that it can, and therefore should, build a utopia on earth.
If only Plato could have foreseen the upshot of his big mistake!
This essay was first published here in October 2013.
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I’m unsure this isn’t a tempest in a teapot. More or less contemporary with Plato, the Buddha taught that all sin is ignorance. Even Augustine would concur with that, over Original Sin, as he described selfish babies learning to sublimate their Will for bigger, better reasons. The Buddha’s cure is not knowledge (viz Eliot in The Rock, on information, knowledge and wisdom); it is Wisdom leading to Compassion. The critical difference is Rousseau’s dictum that Man is born all sweetness and light, a pernicious notion to Platonists and Buddhists alike. The problem with determined Sinners, like a few recalcitrant schoolchildren, is the closed mind and the closed heart. Some few of each cannot be unlocked by Man, try as we might.
I tend to agree with Mr. Masty here. The subject itself is interesting, but I don’t think it helpful to read particular Platonic dialogues without taking care to keep in mind the whole work. Montesquieu’s view on reading is good to keep in mind: ” Si l’on veut chercher le dessein de l’auteur, on ne le peut bien découvrir que dans le dessein de l’ouvrage”.
Plato does not construct any state, much less an ideological one. The Polis, even the Just City in speech, is incomparable to the modern state, which is a wholly un-Platonic venture.
As for Rousseau; I notice he is often blamed, but a reading of his Lettre sur les Spectacles in which he defends censorship of the arts in a republican citt should prevent us from treating him as a commited Jacobin.
Both philosophers would likely agree with Dr. Markos’ point about fallen nature or sin.
As I discuss here, the discussion here is really between good vs bad (Plato) and good vs evil (Christian theology). The question of knowledge is present in both. With Plato, it is as the author suggests. However, with Christian theology, it is assumed that all people are born knowing what the good is, and choose against it (rebel).
This should raise some disturbing questions regarding original sin. Did Adam and Eve rebel against God when they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? How could they have rebelled without knowledge of good and evil? They could not have known what they were going to do was in fact evil until they ate of the Tree. Thus, they had to gain knowledge (as Plato suggests) before they could become ashamed of their actions (as they did). But once they ate of the Tree, all of mankind gained knowledge of good and evil, meaning by Adam and Eve engaging in a Platonic action of doing bad out of ignorance, they created the situation where people would henceforth do evil. So original sin was a Platonic action of knowledge leading to knowing what the good is. Unless you are not ignorant, you cannot do evil, but only bad. This might imply something about the relationship between bad and evil — that bad necessarily precedes evil.
When Adam and Eve disobeyed, they knew they were disobeying, because the command was clear. Overthinking this simple matter is not productive.
In Louis Markos’s essay “Plato’s Big Mistake” it seems what’s left out is illustrated by asking “who’s the teacher?” Original innocence, good, conscience, disobedience, grace, Master teacher, freedom, slavery, grace. Look, seek, knock, grace. Redemption! The adopted are not orphaned. Original innocence includes conscience, perhaps the key ingredient to human nature. No shame suggests knowledge of evil. When God, known as Creator to the created, said “don’t”, the created must have known ‘evil’ with the acquisition of shame, since God did not give shame to the created as evidenced by the proclamation of creation as good, with no shame. Only some would draw a distinction between evil and bad. Which Greek philosopher made the claim that [paraphrasing] ‘all knowledge resides within , one just has to let it out’?
You might appreciate a conversation going on over at The Orthosphere, http://orthosphere.org/2013/10/09/the-liberal-ratchet-the-insatiable-maw-of-moloch/#more-4479, where Kristor brings up a similar idea of societies which deny sin and God – political correctness, as dictated by the mob and gently guided by our benign superiors, will make scapegoats of those who have failed to be conformed by the knowledge machine.
It does seems true that when people are unable to admit their own tendency to moral error they project it onto others. (Carl Jung called this ‘shadow projection.’) But certainly Plato wished people to search out and remedy the causes of moral error within themselves. Plato insisted on salvation through metanoia just as clearly as did St. Paul.
In the battle lines, the Christian has a great ally in Plato against Rousseauianism.
If one pays closer attention to Plato’s entire Corpus, especially significant portions of his metaphysics, one can’t help but consider that Plato did in fact believe in original sin (though of course not in the Christian sense.) Plato asserts that knowledge is virtue, and placed the other virtues (courage, justice, etc.) beneath knowledge. It would then follow that the possession of knowledge requires one to be virtuous (to know IS to be virtuous.) If we look more closely at Plato’s conception of Metaphysics, and the relationship of the body and the soul, we can infer that the body, a sort of prison, IS the original sin of man. It’s need to perceive and understand through its perception is what keeps it from pure knowledge. Whether or not we are truly capable of escaping the Cave is not entirely clear in the Republic. At a cursory reading Plato suggests it is possible only with a correct government, but the government which he calls “correct” (the Kalipolis) is one which he also suggests to be impossible (because it is absent of eros.) The sin of man is his body, and his eros. We are born with the former, and a slave to the latter. Either one of these things could be read to suggest Plato believed in a sort of original sin. One should note that Socrates suggests the only other way one can attain the sort of knowledge a philosopher desires is through the intervention of a God. I’m not sure Plato believed we could attain the perfection the Greek world so fervently sought, and which Plato gives lip service to. In the end I’m sure Plato believes that to know the good is to do the good, and the knowledge is virtue, but whether or not he truly believes we can attain the type of knowledge required for virtue, I am not so sure.
Agreed. On all parts. The author might have mentioned it is Plato’s concept of evil and education which led to his ‘Republic’, where the educated elite ruled.
Plato’s idealized Republic would have suffered the same fate as Rosseau’s ill-fated French Republic. High, unrealistic ideals have always cascaded downwards.
Aristotle, Montesquieu, and most of our 1789 Forefathers knew this tendency towards evil and corruption. If nothing else, history has taught us that power… corrupts .
That being said, I have a qualm with the ending portion of the author’s argument. His argument is that the negative effects of Plato and Rousseau’s beliefs are sufficient to refute them. I will not speak to Rousseau because, although I have read and understand his works fairly well, I don’t think I understand them well enough to give them any Just defense. As for Plato, however, it is not sufficient to say the effects of Plato’s notions about virtue and knowledge are perilous. The aim of Plato’s writings is truth (or so Plato says) and his conclusions should be viewed not simply as what he believed to be good, but moreover what he believed to be true. If this is the case, to adequately refute Plato one must demonstrate that his conclusions are in fact false (or at least one must attempt to attack their truth.) The author has not done so. He has simply demonstrated that the implications of practicing Plato’s doctrine lead to something which the author suggests is not good.
It is also good to note the pejorative use of the word “egalitarian.” The author seems, at least to me, to be opposed to equality of ends. While in most instances I am opposed to egalitarianism, I am not opposed to it for its own sake. If we could in fact all be virtuous, I would be quite pleased. The evils of egalitarianism arise only from the means from which they are implemented.
Maybe the comment by ‘Justin’ above is really +Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who’s removed the realities ‘Sin’, ‘Hell’, and ‘the Devil’ out of the Anglican Baptismal service. he argues he’s done it because people don’t understand them these days. Strange he didn’t do the same with their Funeral Service, and shows a level of incoherence in his thinking, as he should take out heaven too.
“The dangers inherent in Plato’s big mistake were neutralized for two millennia, partially by the corrections by Aristotle and then fully by the Christian doctrine of original sin, especially as it is developed in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante”.
In the 13th century, there was, in fact, a crucial turning point in the teaching of the medieval Church. At the University of Paris, Dominican theologians, having learned about Aristotle’s philosophy from Spanish Muslim philosophers, persuaded the Church to replace Plato with Aristotle in the interpretation of Scripture. Plato had been previously used in deference to the works of the Holy Fathers.
Patrology began in Greece and then moved to Rome. The Fathers had at their disposal Plato and Aristotle for interpreting revealed knowledge. However, they considered Plato more suitable than Aristotle. They believed Plato to possess a more religious spirit, more attuned to mysticism and charity, more respectful of asceticism, and with a nobler conception of God, humanity, and knowledge. In contrast, they saw Aristotle as a coarse empiricist who advocated the eternity of the world, denied the immortality of the soul, viewed humans as animals, and promoted earthly happiness.
While acknowledging some errors in Plato, such as his dualism between the true attained by intellect and the opinable as an object of the senses, the origin of evil from matter rather than spirit, and the fallacy of the pre-existence of the soul trapped in the body, they also recognized elevated elements of spirituality. Examples include Plato’s famous “eros” and the value of the ideal, superior to Aristotelianism, which would forever remain in Christian spirituality.
Saint Thomas Aquinas laid new philosophical foundations for the Church’s teaching, surpassing the Platonic bases previously used, without disparaging the best of Plato. In fact, Thomas also commented on works of Platonic inspiration, such as Proclus’ “Liber de Causis” and Dionysius the Areopagite’s “De divinis nominibus.”
In the Letter “Lumen Ecclesiae” addressed in 1974 to Father Vincent de Couesnongle, Master of the Dominican Order, Pope Paul VI highlighted how Thomas, while giving preference to Aristotle, did not forget the Platonic heritage. This heritage found transfiguration in Saint Augustine, and Thomas drew important philosophical notions from Plato, such as the idea of knowledge by affinity, mentioned by Plato in the Seventh Letter. Thomas referred to it as “cognitio per modum inclinationis or propter connaturalitatem,” a form of affective knowledge used to explain mystical contemplation, an effect of the gift of wisdom.
The Church’s approval of the thought of Saint Thomas marked an epochal turning point. Like all true great innovative movements, it did not constitute a rupture or cancellation of the inheritance of the Fathers culminating in Saint Augustine. Instead, the enduring substance of patristic thought, purified of Platonic defects, passed into Thomistic thought, which drew on Aristotelian thinking, also purified of errors, and whose gaps Thomas took steps to fill.
Interesting article. I highly recommend reading Donoso Cortés’ “Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism,” or at least his précis of this great work, his “Letter to Cardinal to Cardinal Fornari.” He argues — I find, quite convincingly — that all modern errors derive from the denial of the doctrine of Original Sin.