Virtue, Happiness, and Faith in Platonic Philosophy
Virtue and Happiness in Plato
The true good of mankind, happiness, must be attained through the practice of virtue. But what is virtue? Plato fundamentally agrees with the Socratic identification of virtue and knowledge. The lack of virtue is not a perversion of human nature. By its very nature, man seeks the good for themselves. But if you know the good, you can take as good, wrong, anything and, therefore, act inappropriately. Lack of virtue is equivalent, then, to ignorance. Only those who know the idea of property can act appropriately, both in public and private, says Plato in the Republic, at the end of the presentation and analysis of the myth of the cave. When someone chooses an action that is clearly bad, it does, according to Plato, believing that the chosen type of behavior is good because nobody chooses evil knowingly and purposely.
In this sense, it would be the cardinal virtue of prudence, the ability to recognize what is truly good for man and the means available to achieve it. The dependence on the Socratic intellectualism is clear in Plato’s ethical thought. In the Republic, Plato tells us of four main virtues: wisdom, courage and fortitude, temperance, and justice. As we have seen, establishing a correspondence between each of the virtues and parts of the soul and different social classes of the ideal city.
The highest part of the soul, the rational part, has its own wisdom as a virtue. But justice, that general virtue is that each part of the soul fulfills its own function, setting the corresponding harmony in man, imposes limits or the extent to which each of the virtues is to be developed in man. The fact that Plato has an absolute conception of the Good has the function of the rational soul remains fundamental to the organization of the practical life of man, his moral life.
Priority of Faith over Reason
The meeting between Greek philosophy and Christian religion was complex. On the one hand, some Christian philosophers sought to reconcile Christian faith with philosophical reason, while others proposed a radical separation between the scope of the disclosure and rational reflection. The Greek and Latin authors of the period, meanwhile, criticized and flatly rejected the new religion that introduced concepts, in their eyes, absurd and outrageous as the incarnation of God.
However, the synthesis between reason and faith was imposed by authors such as Augustine of Hippo, although the philosophy of Christian theologians were almost always subject to the same religion. The truth of Augustine, heavily influenced by Platonism and rejecting the thought of Aristotle, is a clear example of this submission of reason to faith. The Christian author developed a theory of knowledge to support his thesis of the primacy of faith over reason.
For Augustine, there are three types of knowledge: the sensible, the rational, and the superior rational. The less sensitive knowledge is the lowest degree of knowledge and needs of the body to perform, as is the scope of and changeable no science but only generates opinion.
Rational knowledge, in its lower side, captures the universality of sensible reality, perceiving patterns and regularities in the world. This kind of knowledge can generate science and mathematics but still depends on the changing world to be updated. Finally, the superior rational knowledge, also called by the wisdom of Hippo, is the knowledge of the immutable and eternal truths. In Platonic language, it is knowledge of ideas. However, while the Platonic ideas are autonomous, necessary, and eternal truths of which Augustine speaks in the mind of God.
How is reached, then the sight of these truths in God’s mind? Only if God gives to man’s mortal soul, enlightenment, and that reason itself is not enough to know the ultimate reality, but needs the assistance of God. For Augustine, there is no clear distinction between faith and reason, since there is only one truth that is revealed by the Christian religion. The only reason it is useful to better understand this truth and enter it, but Augustine always stresses that without belief in the dogmas of faith could not acquire true wisdom. Hence his famous statement to understand Cree.
Opposition Between the Sensible and Intelligible World in Plato
The experience of a world in constant motion and change, as Heraclitus had said, posed some difficulties for Plato. What influence can hardly be thought and can not be the object of true science? The way we delivered the world’s moving images or images, seemingly static, but also change: we see the clouds pass, the current of a river, but still see the rock, the tree before our eyes but we know they are subject to mutation and change.
Compared to the sensible world there must be an ideal universe, independent of real things, and the subject of another kind of look different from our eyes. This universe is universal and in it are the ideas that are immutable and eternal, the true reality that is the epitome of the sensible world. The ideas are not only concepts, mental institutions, more or less general, used to sort various meanings of words, but are also foundation and model of the world real.
There are two different worlds: one that changes continuously and we perceive by the way, another that is free of objects of the sensible world change. The objects of the sensible world participate in the ideas, and thus have some reality, however imperfect and assume a reflection of the intelligible world. The idea of table exists as part of the idea of table. The world of sense, therefore, is a world subject to become apparent, not real because it is a shadow intelligible.
The ideas also form the background of ethical, aesthetic concepts, which are rooted in the mind and language – goodness, justice, beauty, love …- There must be something beautiful in itself, just in itself, good in itself. This in itself means the ideal of those concepts, that which does not depend on the many propositions that we do use.