RETURN TO HOME PAGE

Essay by Raymond Drew:

MAN AND GODS TO IDEAL FORMS         

Let me especially think about the formulation of ideas. Every word immediately becomes an idea when, rather than serving as a reminder of that unique, entirely individualised first experience to which it owes its origin, it instead must fit innumerable, more or less similar, (which really means never equal, and therefore, altogether unequal) cases. Every idea originates through equating the unequal. As certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain it is that the ideal a leaf, has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities, and this idea now awakens the notion that in nature there is, besides the leaves, a something called the leaf, perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, accurately measured, coloured, crinkled, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal form.

^[1] Nietzsche.

CIVILISATION: THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN TRADITIONS

Civilised man=s viewpoint may be encapsulated by a greater tendency to observe the world in terms of >distancing,= a concept of Martin Buber=s, defined, according to Kohanski, as

the separation of the world as a whole from man as a self, whether that self is taken as an individual or as an element of society... (Man) felt the tension between separation and unification and started to search for the proper tools and materials to compose his distanced world-being into a manifold unity, a universe.^[2] 

A virtual reality of representations. Although Buber refers to the representational world of humanity as a whole, the action of >distancing= is most apparent in the Western tradition, which idealises rationalism, often claiming to perceive life from an objective standpoint.  Fernand Braudel states,

In India...all actions derive their form from the religious life, not from reasoning. The Greeks were astonished by this, to judge from an anecdote reported by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (265-340): >Aristoxenus the musician tells the following story about the Indians. One of them met Socrates in Athens and asked him to describe the philosophy. AIt is the study of human reality,@ replied Socrates. At which the Indian burst out laughing. AHow can man study human reality,@ he asked, Awhen he knows nothing of divine reality?@...Since the development of Greek thought... the tendency of Western civilisation has been towards rationalism and hence away from the religious life.^[3]

According to Tarnas, the foundation of Western tradition lies in >a sustained, highly diversified tendency to interpret the world in terms of archetypal principles,=^[4] a propensity that can be traced from Homer and Hesiod through to the definitive formulations of Plato and beyond.  While Eastern philosophy does point toward the ultimate reality of the non-dualistic >Thou Art That,= or a >suchness,=^[5] that evades all definition, rather than a creator god, all civilised thought entertains a notion of archetypal principles to some degree. In Hindu polytheism, for example, various gods exemplify certain cosmic processes, for example, Creation, Preservation, and Destruction. Danielou, in his book on Hindu polytheism, argues that Hindu aspects of divinity >are essentially the abstract prototypes of the forms of the manifest world.=^[6] The same concept applies to some extent to Greek polytheism, although divine and immortal manifestations are anthropomorphic powers.  The notion of universals, arguably a step away from polytheism, may be said to underpin civilisation itself, because divine forms, whether abstracted or not, provide a sense of order and stability that are often used to sanction the authority of civil law. But the Western tradition is certainly  grounded in a more objective rationalism, based on the underlying assumption that all material particulars are but shadows or imperfect copies of Ideal Forms. A central axiom of Plato concerns the dualistic division between

that which always is and never becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always becomes and never is... the world being thus created according to the eternal pattern is the copy of something...^[7] (my emphasis)

  The belief that all existence is structurally underpinned by certain divine forms, Ideas, universals,  gods, or changeless absolutes, in various degrees of abstraction, accessible to reason, permeates subsequent Western philosophy.  It exalts reason above mere sensory impression. According to Whitehead, Western philosophy is no more than a series of >footnotes to Plato.=^[8]  There can be no doubt that his influence has been at least substantial, and that elements of his philosophy (modified somewhat by Aristotle)^[9] dominate Western tradition.  The assumed division between the Ideal Forms and the (illusory) phenomenal particulars which are no more than imperfect copies has ensured the continuity of a dominant dualism in Western thought that has not been unproblematic. The fundamental axioms of Plato would have monumental ideological ramifications^[10] over the ensuing centuries. 

MAN AND GODS IN ANCIENT GREECE

It is now commonplace to assert that Western civilisation has its genesis in ancient Greek mythology and philosophy, although, of course, there are antecedents from earlier civilisations, and to some extent, as Joseph Woelfel^[11] argues, signs of Eastern influence inform early Greek thought (for example, in the philosophy of Thales (c. 624 - 546 BC)); the references to the Golden Age of Man in Hesiod=s Works and Days may have been of Oriental descent. In order to examine the background of the belief in the Universal Forms and the development of the Greek conception of Man, this thesis will outline the conception of the gods and Man in archaic Greece.

G. Lowes Dickinson, writing around 1896, considers the state of mind of primitive Man, and the >bewilderment and terror he must have felt in the presence of the powers of Nature.=^[12] What is it? he asks. Greek Man, Dickinson surmises, who is perhaps unique among other cultures, >only with a lucidity and a precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply, AIt is something like myself.@=^[13] He is aware, not only of the awesome powers of nature, but of bewildering passions dwelling within his being. Irrational forces seem to possess him, regardless of personal intention or design. In time, the alien powers are objectified and named.  By personifying them, argues Dickinson, he feels more at home in the world. By creating familiar representations, a sense of order and security prevails.  Despite Dickinson=s assuredness, the process, however, remains unclear, although evidence suggests that the transition to full anthropomorphism was gradual, and not an immediate revelation. When Homer spoke of a goddess as >owl faced= or >cow-eyed= he was referring to their earlier animal forms.  Supplemental or conflicting views exist: Herodotus opined that the gods may have been named by Homer and Hesiod; or that >practically all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt,=^[14] although this explanation has been received sceptically.  Other scholars have suggested that the gods may have evolved from the rites and rituals surrounding early priests and kings. As F. M. Cornford argues, >... the function of King comes to be detached from his personality, and related to it somewhat as the timeless Platonic Idea is related to the many particulars which embody it in time...The divinity of the King becomes a god on the supernatural plane, and his official action is >idealised= into an exploit of that god.=^[15]  Already, at least, we may detect the seed of an attempt to transcend mortality by constructing timeless archetypes.  According to Nilsson, anthropomorphism is not necessary for primitive men - they find no need to differentiate between animals and man. But a higher culture >understands the difference between man and the animals and sets man above the animals.=^[16]

In summary, the gods, thus named, represent natural and irrational powers or daimones: in many instances they appear to be modifications of earlier deities, refashioned into anthropomorphic entities. But most importantly, unlike man, they are immortal entities, and thus, like the heavens above, they outlast the life span of men. In Homer and Hesiod, in particular, they have been arranged and resettled into hierarchies of power. As Hesiod describes it, during the process of their evolution, certain of them are suppressed, banished into the underworld, until, finally, after a series of monumental struggles, the chief among the Olympian pantheon will be Zeus, the sky-father.

Zeus arrived in Greece with the Hellenic immigrants, the Achaeans, and the later Dorians between 1500 and 1000 BC., together with the Ionians and the Æolians.  The patriarchal image of Zeus would be enthroned atop the mountainous terrain of that country, displacing the earlier Ægean earth-mother, who, in turn, would be renamed Demeter. The father of the gods would represent the dominant necessity for the mixed tribes contesting land and making the transition to a settled life: justice, custom, law and order.

The great epics ascribed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey (c. 700 BC), together with the works of Hesiod provide us with valuable resources to study the representations of the Greeks, including their gods. Hesiod=s cosmogony is the only intact survivor of several cosmogonies that were available to Plato and his generation; only fragments of the Orphic cosmogony have survived, and of the others, no trace remains. 

In the cosmogonies of Ancient Greece the gods are not the creators of the world, but their primary function is to preserve order and manage human events.  They came to protect different cities, and shrines to the gods were everywhere: by the roadside, in groves, caves, on headlands, in private dwellings.  We learn from Homer that when the gods speak to man, they place ideas into his head: for example, in The Iliad, Achilleus calls the people to assembly - >the white armed goddess Hera had put this into his mind.=^[17] They occasionally respond to the prayers and sacrifices of men,^[18] or their intentions may be revealed by omens, for example, a flight of birds, or significant dreams.  The gods are responsible for the ordering of the life of man; man, alone, is disordered. At the time, faith in their presence is virtually unquestioned. Snell comments, >Homer=s man does not yet regard himself as the source of his own decisions.=^[19] The feelings, thoughts and the wishes of the characters, adds Snell, are linked to the gods. Thus Homeric man is essentially under the control of external forces - the attention is turned toward exteriorities, and in such a >shame= culture man defines himself through the reflected response of his fellows or the gods. The gods tend to exercise their respective powers in harmony with nature, rather than in contradiction to them. Men view the gods, when they reveal themselves to them, with amazement, and as the Homeric narratives imply, with admiring awe, and not with abject abasement.  They generally appear in the form of noblemen or women, tending to aid the mortals they favour, although they pity their utter wretchedness, their mortality.^[20]  And yet, in Homer, as Snell points out, >when a god associates with a man, he elevates him, and makes him free, strong, courageous, certain of himself. Whenever a great, a decisive deed is to be accomplished the god steps in and gives his advice, and the man chosen for the deed strides cheerfully ahead.=^[21]

The concept of a causeless Cause does not appear in Hesiod=s Cosmogony. Like many accounts of creation in other cultures, the first maps of consciousness begin with a process of division and categorisation, and the accounts are framed within the context of a biological succession. The mythological account is replete with a great many struggles for power, won predominantly by might or cunning. Division, power, and the struggle for power; the formation of hierarchies of power; the suppression or repression of particular powers and the struggle to sustain a ruling order - these remain the central themes, and in metaphoric language, they may be seen to parallel modern conceptions of the ideological process.

Hesiod begins Theogony in praise of the muses. The muses initially address him with disdain, although they are not reluctant to speak through him. The relationship of the Greek farmer to the gods is one of gratitude; he does not cower before them, although he obeys their commands. The muses of Olympos say:

AListen, you country bumpkins, you swag-bellied yahoos,

we know how to tell many lies that pass for truth,

and we know, when we wish, to tell the truth itself.@

So spoke Zeus=s daughters, masters of word-craft...

And commanded me to hymn the race of the deathless gods...^[22]

Hesiod requests the muses to observe the proper order for each thing as it first came into being, and they reply:

Chaos was born first and after her came Gaia...

And the misty Tartaros in the depths of broad-pathed earth

and Eros, the fairest of the deathless gods...

Chaos gave birth to Erebos and black Night;

then Erebos mated with Night and made her pregnant

and she in turn gave birth to Ether and Day.

Gaia now gave birth to starry Ouranos,

her match in size, to encompass all of her,

and be the firm seat for all the blessed gods.^[23]

Chaos, the void, Erebos, darkness, and Nyx, night, begin the account. But the story concerns the emergency of four divine entities - Chaos, Gaia, Tartaros, and Eros. However, as the poem evolves, Hesiod focusses on the family of Gaia (Earth), >not only because it includes everyone and everything else but especially because it is her children and grandchildren whose couplings will decide the question of divine rule in the universe.=^[24] In the long and complex struggle for power that follows, the dik' (custom or justice) of Zeus is finally established; and a matriarchal regime is finally overthrown by a patriarchal system. The importance of the rule of justice and law is not to be underrated: the children from Zeus by his second wife, Thetis, are Eunomia (Law), Dik' (Justice) and Eirene (Peace).

One of the principle themes of Theogany, set in familial context, involves oedipal rivalry. And significantly, Zeus, fearing that the forthcoming second offspring of his first wife, Metis, might overthrow him, he swallows her. Years later, experiencing the onset of a headache, and helped by either Hephaestus or Prometheus who deliver his head a splitting blow, the goddess Athena springs forth, fully armed, shouting a battle cry. This potent metaphor, according to Campbell, illustrates a new process of sublimation:

In the patriarchal cosmogonies... the normal imagery of divine motherhood is taken over by the father... in the classical image of Zeus bearing Athene from his brain, where we have already recognised an example of Asublimation,@ we now note that the Asublimation@ has been rendered by means of an image of the type that Freud called Atransference upward@: as the woman gives birth from the womb, so the father from his brain.  Creation by the power of the Word is another instance of such a transfer to the male womb: the mouth the vagina, the word the birth.  And one extremely important consequence of this bizarre, but highly honoured, aberration upward, is the notion, common to all Occidental spirituality - and particularly stressed by our numerous bachelor and homosexual great teachers - that spirituality and sexuality are opposed.^[25]

The suppression of sexuality and of the feminine element will become a major preoccupation in later thought. Apart from the male usurpation of the feminine role, there is ample evidence, at least from a psychoanalytic perspective, that Hesiod=s Theogany can be likened to a dream sequence, producing intimations of the unconscious struggle of within psyche. Chaos, for example, provides the metaphor of the womb and the symbiotic stage that precedes the first six months of life. This symbiotic stage is further represented in Hesiod=s Works and Days as the paradisaical >Golden Age= of man.  At that time, Hesiod writes, men lived like gods, carefree, without ailments; although mortal, they died painlessly, easily. >But the earth covered this race, and they became holy spirits that haunt it...(now they) keep a watchful eye over lawsuits and wicked deeds...=^[26] Successive races evolved - a childish, Silver race, a Bronze, a fourth of heroes, or demi gods, each fallen in turn; finally, the fifth race, the race of Hesiod, came into being in the Age of Iron; their lives are beset by rivalry and strife, and who are defenceless against harm.^[27]   In keeping with Freud=s account, the early struggles and frustrations of the child are represented by Tartaros, the underworld.  The marriage of the early divinity, Ouranos, to his mother, Gaia, >establishes and oedipal precedent from the beginning.=^[28] Finally, after a series of struggles, Zeus arguably, and not without cunning, manages to ensure he retains his fatherhood of the gods without being overthrown by his sons, achieving, at the same time, >virtually unlimited access to goddesses and women.=^[29]  The reign of Zeus, therefore, can be arguably likened to the establishment of the ego and superego over the unregenerate passions of the id.

Homer=s rather sunny Olympian deities can additionally be viewed as the idealised objectification of life from the viewpoint of the Greek aristocracy at the time.  And as the creators of law, can be said to provide >higher= justification for laws on earth, even the most tyrannical. The gods parallel the aristocracy, and man the servile classes. The Homeric epics show, says Guthrie, a set of beliefs which 

are the marks of an aristocratic and materially wealthy class, whose material circumstances have induced a predilection for good living and a matter-of-fact outlook on life and its problems. This society was based on serfdom, and it is natural to conjecture that the views of the serfs on the same subject were very different from those of their masters. The local underworld deities were probably with them all the time, much closer to them than any Olympian could be to anyone.^[30] 

While the gods are immortal, the short life of Homeric man ends fades to near oblivion. The psyche, or soul of mortal man, scarcely more than a vapour, is transported to Hades. In time, by the sixth century, the desire for immortality would assert itself via the Eleusinian mysteries and Orphism. In time, the matter would engage the attention of Plato, and the notion of a rather more substantial soul would unfold.

But for Homeric man, the individual is disunified. According to Bruno Snell, the language of Homer made no provision for the intact body as such. The physical body was not conceived as a unit but an aggregate. >The body is a mere construct of independent parts variously put together.=^[31]  Again, in regard to the intellect or soul, psyche is no more than the force that keeps a human being alive. At death it leaves through the mouth, as breath. The other words for mind, thymos and noos, refer to >the generator of motion or agitation, while noos is the cause of ideas and images...(thymos is the) organ of (e)motion.=^[32]  Snell has no doubt that people grew to dislike ascribing the psyche to animals as well as men, and created the idea of a thymos which leaves the animal when it dies. Noos is linked to sight, to see, to realise. Snell quotes Iliad 16.688, >The noos of Zeus is stronger than that of men,=^[33] thus linking realisation and a budding rationalism to the gods. But any centre of rational thought lacks a centre. >Thinking is described as >speaking= and is located in the heart but usually in the... Amidriff@ or Adiaphragm@=.^[34]

Thus Homeric man viewed these elements as organs, rather than parts of a whole. The first extant record of the notion of a soul and of depth of soul (called psyche), as something that pervades everything, and/or as a source of rational thought^[35] lies with Heraclitus (c. 521 to 487 BC) and some of his contemporaries.

Considering the very different notion of self in the period of Homer and Hesiod, we cannot ascribe >personality,= to the Olympian deities at least in the sense we know it today. As Jean-Pierre Vernant points out, >One of the characteristic features of Greek religion is to give to the powers of the beyond a distinctive individuality and a purely human appearance. But does this make them >persons= and have the links that unite them with the faithful, in worship, assumed the form of >personal= relationships?=^[36]  As he points out, the relation to the gods and the community were interlinked. There is no division between gods and polis, religious qualities and civic virtue. >In this context the individual establishes a relationship with the divine through his membership in the community.=^[37] Vernant stresses the fact that the Greek gods are powers, rather than persons.^[38] Aphrodite, for example, >is a beauty, a particular goddess, but at the same time she is >beauty= - what we would call the essence of beauty - that is to say, the power that is present in all beautiful things, and through this they are made beautiful.=^[39]

One further >class= of humanity, the notion of the hero, requires attention. The Homeric hero is favoured by the gods, and by and large, under their protection. The hero retains his name after death, and he belongs to the populace, rather than to a family. His identity stands out from the anonymous mass of the dead. After death, he may acquire a quasi-divine status. His exploits, his valour, his ability to transcend the ordeals of humanity render him of special status among men. The hero is the exceptional human being. Presented with a trial or an ordeal, he achieves the impossible. But he achieves his goal primarily because of supernatural assistance. The primary function of the hero is to illustrate the possibility, perhaps at the time, the impious possibility - of crossing the gulf to the divine.   

THE CONCEPT OF UNIVERSAL OR IDEAL FORMS

John Burnet, writing in Greek Philosophy, asserts the unrelatedness of Greek mythology to Greek philosophy. Referring to mythology and cosmogony, he says, >it cannot even be said that they are the germ from which philosophy developed.=^[40]  Burnet and some of his contemporaries were believers in the notion of the Greek miracle. As Vernant remarks about this phenomenon,

in this view the birth of philosophy, in Greece, was seen as the beginning of scientific thought - or one might say, >thought= itself... Seen from this point of view, the Greeks are inevitably raised above all other peoples and seen as predestined, for in them the logos was made flesh. Burnet argued that if the Greeks invented philosophy it was because of their exceptional intellectual qualities, their observational ability, combined with their powers of reasoning....In the course of the last fifty years, however, The West=s confidence in its monopoly over reason has been undermined.^[41] 

These days, >the West can no longer assume its thought to be the only thought, nor hail the dawn of Greek philosophy as that of the mind itself.=^[42] Vernant cites F. M. Cornford, who in his Principium Sapientiae, establishes that Ionian physics was grounded  in mythology. The early Greek philosophers, in particular Anaximander, abstracted and transposed and made secular elements of Greek mythology. Anaximander=s philosophy and Hesiod=s Theogany have a structure >that corresponds even in details.=^[43]

The ideal forms of Plato lay the groundwork for subsequent Western philosophy, and indeed, Western Science. In a remarkable book, Brisson and Meyerstein^[44] outline the central axioms of Plato=s Timaeus.  Those relevant to our topic are:

1. Reality is separated into two domains: the intelligible Forms (eidos, idea), pure, eternal, immutable and simple: and the complex sensible particulars, ever-changing (kinetos) in time;

2. The Good occupies a singular situation among the Forms;

3. In a sensible world, all that becomes as the result of a cause;

4. The sensible world is the result of the ordering effect of a god;

5. The demiurge is good (agathos);

6. The demiurge is not omnipotent;

7. The demiurge orders a primordial stuff, the khora;

8. A cause, called anagke, perpetually resists the order which the demiurge attempts to introduce into the world;

9. Sensible particulars, including the heavenly bodies, are made of four elements only: fire, air, water and earth;

10. All that a benevolent demiurge endeavouring to introduce some order into the khora can do is use his model as a Aperfect paradigm@ and to attempt to bring it about that the result of his efforts will be the best possible copy (ikon) of that model.

11. As a copy of a perfect paradigm, the sensible world made by the demiurge can be nothing other than a living thing whose body is made from the four elements and whose soul (psyche or psukhe) is endowed with reason (nous).

In Timaeus and elsewhere, Plato introduces a radical inversion of the notion of the psyche. In Homer, psyche is an insubstantial vapour but sensory appearances, disconnected or not, have real substance to the extraverted consciousness of the period. By the time of Plato (c. 428 - 347 BC), a monumental change has occurred: a scepticism about the objective nature of the gods has developed.^[45]  The psyche is composed of a rational element, logistikon, that reasons, a >spirited= element, thumoeides, and the appetitive part, epithumetikon, each corresponding to his ideal community (in Republic) of Guardians, warrior Auxiliaries and Producers.  The last of these, the most insatiate, requires the discipline and control of the two superior elements; one cannot fail to note an equivalence with Freud=s conception of super-ego, ego, and id.  Plato thus attempts to unify the psychological or metaphysical and the sociological.

The sensible world therefore, is now construed to be a copy of a perfect paradigm, a mere representation. In the new hierarchy, the senses and the phenomenal world have been suppressed, dependent on the ideal forms, and at this point we can recall Nietzsche=s comment about no copy turning out as correctly as the primal form.^[46] Not only is the inner hierarchy of Man reinvented; the ideal State, too, in parallel, has been redefined, with reason and the philosophers at its head.

That which is apprehensible by thought with a rational account is the thing that is always unchangeably real; whereas that which is the object of belief together with unreasoning sensation is the thing that becomes and passes away, but never has real being. (Timaeus 27d-28a)

Plato=s theory of ideal forms postulates that the world we experience with the five senses cannot be fully real or reliable. Aware of the qualities of impermanence and change ever present in life, he reasoned that knowledge would provide certainty and freedom from error. In his dualistic world view, in which we may draw parallels with Homeric dualism, Plato identified the forms with the rational, and the senses and matter with the non-rational and disorderly. The sensory and fleeting world, associated with decay and mortality, would not, for Plato, offer a man a taste of the divine, the immortal.  The divine forms, invisible and eternal, exist somewhere, and particulars strive unsuccessfully to emulate them. Plato himself must have had some difficulty with the notion, because after writing Phaedo, he returned later in life to reargue his case.

It is not within the scope of this thesis to examine his case^[47] for the existence of forms in detail. However, of central concern to our topic are the ideological ramifications of the notion of the Forms and the status of the particulars. And closely allied to this is the concept of the immortality of the soul.

Plato argued that the soul is akin to the Forms, and like them, immortal. He believed in metempsychosis, and in Phaedo he expounds the case for the survival of soul. In addition, he describes the philosophic ideal, exemplified by Socrates: the true philosopher should not care for the pleasures of love; he desires to get away from the body and turn to the soul.^[48]  For the body is deceptive.  Absolute beauty and absolute good are not accessible to the senses - they cannot be seen with the eyes.  The body is despicable because it infects the soul^[49], is the source of endless trouble because it requires food, is liable to disease, fills men >full of loves, and lusts, and fears and fancies...(and) takes away from us the power of thinking at all.=^[50]  Wars, Plato argues, are indirectly caused by the body, because the desire for money, the direct cause, has to be acquired to look after the body. Finally, if we wish to have pure knowledge we must quit the body and its foolishness.^[51]  Thus death is to be welcomed.

Plato makes a clear distinction between the visible and the invisible world. The visible is of the body, the invisible of the soul. The soul utilises the body. The sense of sight is >used= by the soul.^[52] The soul is the head, the ruler, the governor, and the body the servant. Therefore the soul is akin to the divine and the body the mortal. But in mortal existence, the soul is imprisoned within the body.

The notion of such a soul did not originate with Plato, nor with Homer, but owes its development to the mystery religions of the 6^th Century BC: Orphism, with its links to Pythagorus, believed in the existence of a soul and in the transmigration of soul. By the practice of certain spiritual exercises and acts of purification, the inner divine element may be liberated.

With Plato=s appropriation of this element of mystery religion, an act of inversion has taken place: the psyche is now no longer the insubstantial shadow of the body, a fluttering vapour. >The living body... changes its status: it now becomes a simple appearance, an illusory, insubstantial, fugitive image...=^[53]  Now the soul alone is real; the body, the senses, and with it, nature, sink to the lowest level in the new hierarchy of being. The body becomes an impediment, a tomb, something to be denied.  Today, many therapists would call this the schizoid perspective. It requires an identification and a loyalty to an invisible authority.

In Timaeus 41, after the Creator had created the gods, he addressed them:

 Three tribes of mortal beings have still to be created, but if created by me they would be like gods. Do ye therefore make them; I will implant in them the seed of immortality, and you shall weave together the mortal and immortal, and provide food for them, and receive them again in death. Thus he spake, and poured the elements into the cup in which he had mingled the soul of the universe. They were no longer pure as before, but diluted; and the mixture he distributed into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each to a star - then have mounted them, as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and told them their future birth and human lot. They were to be sown in the planets, and out of them was to come forth the most religious of animals, which would hereafter be called man. The souls were to be implanted in bodies, which were in a perpetual flux, whence, he said, would first arise sensation; secondly, love, which is a mixture of pleasure and pain; thirdly, fear and anger, and the opposite affections: and if they conquered these, they would live righteously, but if conquered by them, unrighteously. He who lived well would return to his native star, and would there have a blessed existence; but if he lived ill, he would pass into the nature of a woman, and if he did not then alter his evil ways, into the likeness of some animal...^[54]

Plato goes on to explain that the head is superior to the body, being nearest to heaven. He concludes Timaeus by adding that completeness requires something to be said about other animals:

>First of all, women, who are probably degenerate and cowardly men.=^[55] Birds, wild animals, inhabitants of the waters - all are all reincarnated men, the last the most ignorant of them.

THE INVERSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS, CONTINUED

Over the course of three centuries, Greek man has reconstituted himself.  The insubstantial psyche has become soul, an immortal soul passing from life to life.  The body is now insubstantial, illusory, the senses deceptive. They are certainly not linked with the Good. Reason and, and with it, soul, are linked to the divine realm. Being is no longer found in nature or the present continuum of sensory awareness; being is related to a set of invisible forms and ideals, accessible to reason or intuition, not to the senses.  Aspects of the  gods have been abstracted and introjected into the true nature of man.

By despising the body and the senses, and with them, other elements associated with the impulsive and the sensational, the spontaneous and the irrational, the feminine is suppressed; nature is established as mere matter to be utilised. The rationalisations continue: divine law is unchanging, immortal. It remains the real authority, and it is a timeless authority. Consciousness, once directed at externalities, has begun to become reflexive.  Man had discovered a new identity, one that transcended the phenomenal, but alienating himself  in the process.

And man, for so long separated from the divine, came to consider the possibility of becoming as a god.  Formerly, only dead heroes acquired semi-divine status. The first man to achieve divine status was the Spartan Lysander, conqueror of Athens (404 BC).  As Nilsson relates, the cities raised altars and sacrificed to him as a god. Yet Lysander was not officially deified. But one hundred years later, Demetrius Poliorketes and his father Antigonus were hailed as saviour-gods. The place where Demetrius stepped from his chariot was declared divine.^[56] By then,

...criticism and the course of events had overthrown the gods, or at least the unreflecting belief in them, and the compelling power of the state, which had kept the individual in his place, had fallen to pieces. There was no longer any limit to man=s aspirations. That which, with mingled envy and horror, the Greeks had seen long ago in the tyrant, man the equal of the gods, now presented itself once more with redoubled force. The old barrier had been pulled down, and it was no longer felt to be insolence (Üβρις) to raise oneself above the level of ordinary men...the origin of the cult of men in Greece is to be sought in the convulsions of the dying religion.^[57]

The ideological ramifications of the hegemony of reason sought by Plato, and subsequently by Aristotle, and then by subsequent Western civilisation are many. Establishing the dictatorship of reason over the non rational elements would prove a difficult matter. In the Republic much thought is given to censorship and control of those elements. In old age, in Laws, Plato wrote,

The principle thing is that no man and no woman should ever be without an officer set over him, and none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his individual responsibility: in peace as in war he must live with his eye on his superior officer, following his lead and guided by him in his smallest actions... in a word, we must train the mind not even to consider acting as an individual or know how to do it.^[58]

A cause, called anagke, he had argued, perpetually resists the order which the demiurge attempts to introduce into the world, and as Plato neared death, he began to lose faith in men and identify more with the Ideal. In  Laws X two souls are postulated, one working for the good and the other in opposition: perhaps a precursor of the devil in early Christian theology.

Feminist scholars have rightly drawn our attention to the tradition of misogyny in Greek thought and mythology, notably in Hesiod and, as we have cited, in Plato. For the misdeeds of Prometheus, Zeus exacted punishment in the form of woman, and Pandora, with >the mind of a bitch and a thievish nature,=^[59] was formed from earth and water, to bring grief and tears to men. The growing drive to bring nature under control and to establish firm principles of governance of both state and the inner man could not, in the end, acknowledge the feminine principle, which it associated with less civilised times and with all men=s very physical and comparatively unplanned births. If nature and the sensual world had to be finally controlled, so did woman. As Cavarero states,

Humans are thus split into thought and body, truth and life, and the second term of the dichotomy is allowed to slide toward insignificance. The split sets up a trajectory that explicitly establishes philosophy=s tendency to disavow reality. Soon the concept of man (anthropos) - named in the masculine singular...will make its way into philosophical language. AMan is a rational animal,@ Aristotle=s famous definition proclaims. Bodies, feelings, and the deceptive senses supposedly belong elsewhere. (This)... realm of surfaces cannot perceive height or depth. Nor indeed can it perceive truth, which, unlike facts, is never tangible or superficial.^[60]

Thus Buber=s >distancing= from life had been accomplished. These fundamental constructs, with their ideological implications, would continue to inspire and underpin the course of Western civilisation throughout the years to come.^[61]