The invention of inwardness is an episode in the history of the Platonist concept of intelligibility, which defines the relation between the soul and Platonic Ideas or Forms. After glancing at Stoic precursors to Neoplatonist inwardness, this chapter focuses on the history and problems of the concept of intelligibility in Plato’s own writing, beginning with the way Plato uses the existence of intelligible Form to define the nature of the soul in the Phaedo, then proceeding to investigate how the concept of intelligibility took shape in the course of Plato’s attempt to solve a problem about the very possibility of Socratic inquiry in the Meno. Plato’s initial solution, the doctrine of Recollection, raises further problems about the nature of intelligibility, which Plato tackles using a metaphor that becomes fundamental for later Platonism: intellectual vision.
For the most part, we in the West still take it for granted that we can talk about an inmost self and conceive of it as an inner world, a sort of private interior realm where we are most at home and most ourselves. Many still find this concept indispensable, as if we human beings would lose sight of some important part of ourselves without it. Yet such talk is hardly universal or necessary for human life. It is not an inevitable part of human self-description, in contrast (say) to such concepts as perception, life, and mortality. Nor is it as widespread in the cultures of the world as the notion that human beings seek happiness, want to know the truth, can be good or evil, can come close to the divine or be far away. Human beings can describe themselves in emotional, ethical, and religious terms without recourse to the conception of a private inner world. Indeed before Augustine everyone seems to have found it natural to do so, having no notion that there was an alternative.
The texts of the Western tradition bear witness to this. Not only the Bible but Plato and Aristotle and the rest of classical philosophy could say what they had to say about human nature without invoking the private inner space that modern Westerners find so familiar and intimate a part of themselves. Of course this does not mean that Augustinian inwardness has no precursors—as if it came out of nothing. There is an ancient language of inwardness that goes back ultimately to Greek philosophers talking about the soul being in the body. But such talk by itself does not imply that the soul is a private inner world or that the soul can turn to look within itself. Indeed, quite the contrary: for classical philosophers the soul was perceptive like the eye—it looked away from itself, paying attention to the world around it.
The history of inwardness is the story of how Westerners developed the desire to see within the soul and therefore came to conceive of the soul doing what no eye ever did: turning to look within its own self. Hefty philosophical convictions lie behind this familiar but radically incoherent metaphor of looking inward—more than just the notion that the soul is in the body, more even than the notion that the soul is a deeper and better kind of being than the body. Inwardness begins to take shape when the soul becomes the great clue to the nature of ultimate reality and final happiness. In many different forms of ancient philosophy and religion—among Platonists and Peripatetics, Gnostics and Manichaeans, Cicero and the Stoics—inquiry into the nature of the soul was thought to issue in wisdom about divinity and blessedness. The god’s command “Know Thyself,” interpreted to mean “know thy soul,” stood as a motto at the head of ancient treatises on the soul, hinting at a promise of divine knowledge as the fruit of self-knowledge.1 Thus inwardness involves more than a conception of the self; it is concerned with the divine, the eternal, the ultimate. From its inception, inwardness meant seeking a glimpse of the soul’s inner relation to its divine origin.
For ancient philosophers, it was an obvious fact that the soul was “in” the body. But this did not lead them to anything like an inward turn or an inner space, until they began to locate the ultimate goal of human desire within the soul. Hence the language of inwardness first begins to play an important role in the writings of the Roman Stoics, whose ethics laid great stress on the contrast between what is within the soul and what is outside it, in the conviction that the soul’s good lies entirely within its own power. So Stoics like Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca thought we should turn our attention within, in the sense of attending to what is our very own, rather than setting our hearts on things outside, which do not really belong to us. Thus Epictetus asks,
In what is the good, then? . . . If you wanted, you would have found it was in yourselves, and you would not have wandered outside or sought things alien to you as if they were your own. Turn to yourselves!2
Marcus Aurelius likewise urges us to consider that “the source of the good is within.”3 But this is not an invitation to enter an inner world: the point rather is that our own choices are the ultimate source of good or evil, so that our soul’s health or harm is entirely independent of external things or circumstances beyond our control. So for Epictetus progress in wisdom means withdrawing from external things and turning to our own power of choice.4
Related to this Stoic turn to the self is the conviction that the soul is divine, made of the same stuff as the gods, and the dwelling place of an immortal spirit. Hence Seneca can say “God is near you, with you, in you.”5 He is referring to the guardian spirit that is supposed to be in each one of us, but he also alludes to the Stoic conviction that the soul itself is inherently divine, made of the same living fire as the celestial gods.6 For the Stoics were materialists, believing that everything that exists, even God and the soul, is made of bodily elements (earth, air, water, or fire).
No doubt this is why the language of inwardness in Stoicism never developed into the concept of self as inner world. For materialism is not conducive to inwardness. It lacks the dissatisfaction with the visible world that leads to the aspiration to find something deeper. Inwardness begins when that deeper dimension, something fundamentally other than the world of ordinary life, is sought within the self. The Stoics contributed to later Western inwardness by speaking so highly of what is within the human soul but did not get as far as inventing the notion of inner self, because they had no concept of something deeper, beyond mortal sight, which could be joined with the concept of soul to make an inner world. For all their talk of turning to oneself, the notion that the soul might turn into itself and find a whole separate world of its own seems never to have crossed their minds.7
It was of course Platonism that first conceived of that deeper dimension, that other world that is more real and true than the visible, bodily world—and it is to this other world that we must look for the roots of Western inwardness. Talk about turning to the soul or to oneself does not indicate an inner self until the soul or self becomes a different kind of being than anything in this world. Hence the earliest metaphysic of inwardness, which I call “the inward turn,” arises within the Platonist tradition,8 where it is elaborated in detail by the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, who inherits both Platonist talk about the intelligible world and Stoic talk about turning to the self or soul.9
Plato himself did not locate this other world in the soul but rather in what he called “the intelligible place,”10 a realm of being whose elements are not material and therefore not visible to the eyes of the body, but rather are “intelligible”, that is, understood by the intellect alone. This is the place of Platonic Ideas or Forms. Later Platonists called it “the intelligible world.” Plotinus was evidently the first to conceive of it as an inner world, located within the soul. In any case, Plato himself does not speak this way but locates this other world using metaphors of heavenly height rather than inner depth: one finds the place of Forms not by turning inward but by looking upward and outward, as if gazing from earth to heaven, or looking beyond the whole visible world to that which is outside it11—or else as if one were climbing up out of a dark cave into the true light of day.12 How it is that the world of Platonic Ideas came to be located within the soul (i.e., how the intelligible world became the inner world) is the first part of my story.
Plato does on occasion use a language of inwardness. He will talk of looking into one’s own soul, for instance, but unlike Plotinus he does not connect it with perception of the intelligible world and its eternal Forms.13 Rather, it seems to be a form of ethical selfexamination, an effort to discern whether one’s soul is well ordered. One may, for example, try to look at the effect that the virtue of temperance has when it is present in oneself14 or fix one’s gaze on the constitution of the republic in one’s soul.15 Evidently, it is possible to see such things because thinking is like talking to oneself,16 and what one says to oneself is, as it were, written or painted in the soul.17 The closest Plato comes to an inward turn is when he describes someone “looking in himself” at the opinions and assertions pictured in his soul,18 and the closest he comes to a concept of inner self is the one time that he describes the soul’s talking to itself as an “inner dialogue of the soul with itself.”19 But none of this gets very close to the picture of the self as an inner world, which is familiar to us from Augustine and suggested earlier by Plotinus.
The deeper dimension in Platonism was always linked to the soul, even if it was not originally inside it. The conceptual link was forged by the argument for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo, which turns on the notion that the soul is somehow “akin to what is pure and everlasting, immortal and always the same.”20 Plato portrays Socrates on the day of his death staking everything on this kinship between the soul and immortal Forms, a kinship not only examined but also exemplified by Socrates’ practice of philosophical inquiry. In Plato’s dramatization, to inquire about the immortality of the soul is as it were to practice one’s own immortality—for all philosophical inquiry strengthens the bond between the soul and the deathless Forms to which it is kin.21
Thus Plato’s Socrates offers, both in theory and in practice, an alternative to the ancient Homeric picture of the soul and its ultimate destiny. In Homer the soul, or psyche, is the insubstantial, fluttering thing that escapes the human body in its last breath and is carried off to the shadowy underworld.22 The Phaedo presents an alternative destination for the soul after death, and a practical route to get there. The pure soul does not end up in an insubstantial underworld, but dwells among true realities, divine and deathless Forms. The road to this true home of the soul is philosophical inquiry, in which the soul investigates unchanging truths by pure thought alone, separating itself as much as possible from the body and thus purifying itself and “practicing to die”—for death is not the destruction of the soul but merely its purification, its separation and liberation from the body.23 Plato’s new notion, the “intelligible place,” thus implies a new conception of the human soul: not the fluttering last breath in danger of being scattered on the wind but rather a being of higher order than body and breath, somehow kin to the deathless being of the Forms.24
A powerful spirituality comes to birth with this text, a project of turning from sensible to intelligible, from the world of transient and mortal bodies to the world of deathless and unchanging Forms. It is a spirituality that divides the human self cleanly in two: there is the body, which inhabits the visible world, and the soul, which belongs ultimately among divine Forms. This famous Platonist dualism of body and soul rests on the logically prior conception of an intelligible realm of being, which gives the soul an orientation, activity, and destiny wholly separate from the body. Without this other world or deeper dimension, “soul” could only mean what it had meant for Homer or for the Hebrew Scriptures: one aspect of the human self among many, overlapping and interacting with the others—heart and mind, bowels and liver, spirit and breath, flesh and body, none of them neatly contrasting to the soul as visible to invisible, mortal to immortal, mental to physical, or outer to inner.25
For Platonist spirituality, then, not only our happiness but our self-knowledge depends on the relation between the soul and the eternal Forms. To know our own soul we must know the Forms. That at any rate is how the argument goes in the Phaedo, which grounds knowledge of our souls’s immortality on premises about the deathlessness and immutability of the Forms.26 Augustine’s inward turn reverses the direction of argument, aiming to arrive at a knowledge of the eternal by first looking at the soul. But whichever way the argument goes (from the eternal to the soul or from the soul to the eternal) the key premise is that there is some kind of link between the two. The nature of that link is a crucial topic of Platonist reflection and a central theme in Augustine’s writing up through the time of his Confessions.
The relation between soul and Forms is summed up in the Platonist term “intelligible” (noetos). To be intelligible means to be understandable, to be a fit object for the intellect or mind (nous). Platonic Forms are intelligible, because they are what our intellects can know. (We cannnot, strictly speaking, know sensible things, because they are too unstable and deceptive to be objects of certain knowledge; that is why Plato says they are objects of opinion or belief rather than knowledge). Intelligibility thus defines the very nature of the Forms: they are what the eye of the mind sees, in contrast to sensible things, which are what the eye of the body sees. Investigating the relation of the soul to the Forms, with all its implications for human happiness and wisdom, thus boils down to the attempt to understand the nature of intelligibility. The inner world is a concept that develops in the course of that investigation. The invention of inwardness is an episode in the history of the Platonist concept of intelligibility.
Intelligibility has a history because it is a concept that generates problems. One deep problem stems from the soul’s presence in the sensible or material world. Plato sometimes seems to divide the universe of things neatly in two: the intelligible and the sensible, Being and Becoming, the world of Forms and the world of bodies. But Platonist ontology cannot really be that simple. There is more to the universe than just bodies and Forms; there is the troublesome existence of the soul itself. Obviously (to a Platonist) the soul is not a body, yet it is not exactly a Form either. The problem is that a Form is immutable, being “always such, the same as itself,”27 as Plato puts it, while the soul plainly is not. The soul changes, becomes more or less wise, more or less happy, more or less virtuous. If the great boundary line on our map of the universe is drawn betwen the sensible and the intelligible, then the soul appears strangely out of place, far from the immutable realm of intelligible things but not really at home in the sensible world either.
Plato devised the myth of the Fall in part to account for this: how the soul has its true home in the intelligible place but has lost it, falling from heaven into bodies—thither one day to return, as Plato briefly suggests,28 thus spawning one of the most important and enduring visions of the afterlife in the Western tradition. But until its return to heaven the soul is locked in the body as in a tomb or prison, chained as in a dark cave, in exile from the upper world.29 The reality of the deeper dimension casts the ordinary world in a dark light—for the authentic light, the true intelligible light, is elsewhere.
It thus becomes an urgent practical question of Platonist spirituality how to find the true light, when it is so unlike what we are used to seeing. For Plato himself the answer is tied up with the practice of dialectic, that is, philosophical inquiry by means of question and answer. If we want to see what the relation of soul and Forms looks like for the founder of Platonism, the best place to look is his portrait of his teacher Socrates. The key theoretical explorations of the relation of soul to Form are found in the places in Plato’s dialogues where the character named Socrates reflects on his own practice of dialectical inquiry, its grounds and its hopes. These reflections are the seedbed in which Western inwardness has its roots.
The history of the Platonist concept of intelligibility begins when Plato, early in his philosophical career, faces a serious problem. He must find an alternative to skeptical interpretations of Socratic inquiry. As the later history of Plato’s own Academy shows,30 such interpretations come naturally. And it is not hard to see why. Plato’s early writings present no theory of eternal Forms, only a Socrates who seeks rather than possesses wisdom. The Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues is wise only because he knows he has no great knowledge, and he is Athens’s great teacher of philosophy because he teaches nothing but a recognition of one’s own ignorance.
How he goes about teaching this is familiar to readers of such early Platonic dialogues as Euthyphro and Charmides. These “aporetic” dialogues, as they are called, all follow the same pattern: Socrates lures someone into philosophical inquiry by asking him to define a key ethical term such as “virtue” or “temperance.” Once his conversation partner takes the bait and formulates a definition, the peculiarly Socratic dialectic of question and answer begins, with Socrates asking critical questions about the definition and his interlocutor trying to defend it. In fact, the interlocutor ends up offering a whole series of definitions, one after another, as each is refuted in turn. It is a peculiar kind of refutation. Socrates does not simply criticize or disprove his interlocutor’s definitions; that is part of the cunning of his dialectic of question and answer. To answer Socrates’ critical questions is to find oneself in the end agreeing to the refutation of one’s own views, and thus discovering firsthand one’s own ignorance. Hence the early dialogues all conclude without finding a right answer (an orthos logos), leaving both Socrates and his friend in a state of perplexity or puzzlement (aporia, whence the description “aporetic” dialogue).
The point of this Socratic method is that we cannot search for wisdom if we think we already have it. Socratic questioning therefore undermines preconceived notions of the ethical life in order to spur one on to find the truth about virtue—the truth about how to live and what kind of person to be—which one now recognizes one does not know. But the method is undermined by its own success. If the predictable result of Socratic inquiry is simply perplexity and recognition of ignorance, then what hope is there of ever finding a good answer to a question like “what is virtue?”
Plato addresses this problem in a key transitional dialogue, the Meno. 31 The first third of this dialogue follows the pattern of the early aporetic dialogues. After Socrates lures young Meno into a discussion about virtue, Meno offers a series of definitions of the word virtue (aretē), each of which he comes to see (under Socratic questioning) as inadequate—and he ends up puzzled and perplexed. In fact he gives a classic description of the puzzlement that Socrates induces—and then asks the central question that Plato must deal with in the dialogue. It is like an author being questioned by one of his characters: after putting Socrates’ interlocutors through so many interrogations, Plato finds that one of them has gotten lively enough to ask a puzzling question of his own. This liveliness is of course the author’s success, not failure. For Meno’s question poses one of the most fruitful problems in all of Western philosophy. By challenging the project of Socratic inquiry it helps initiate the project later known as Platonism.
Meno wants to know how it is even possible to inquire, that is, to seek knowledge of what one does not already know. Hence his question concerns the very possibility of philosophy, the search for wisdom that we do not already possess.
But Socrates, what way is there of seeking this thing you don’t know anything about? What sort of thing do you propose to seek, among all the things you don’t know? And even if you happened upon it, how would you recognize that this is the thing you didn’t know?32
Plato’s answer is that in a sense we already do have knowledge of the thing we seek, and that what we do in seeking and learning is actually to recollect a piece of knowledge that was present in our soul all along.33 This doctrine of Recollection is as good a place as any to mark the beginning of Western inwardness. In stating it, Plato often uses a distinctive verb (en-einai) which means literally “to be in.” The verb also has a relevant secondary meaning: “to be possible”—as when we say “she has it in her,” meaning, “it is possible for her to do it.”34 The point of the doctrine in any case is that knowledge is possible for us because it is in a certain sense already present in our souls. The doctrine of Recollection thus has the effect of enlarging our conception of the soul and its contents. If Plato is right, there is more in our souls than we are apt to realize, and this “more” that is in us opens up the possibility of deep adventures. Inwardness is about these hitherto unsuspected possibilities of the soul.
In particular, this Platonic enlargement of the soul grounds an optimistic epistemology—a specifically Platonist rather than Socratic view of the possibilities of human knowledge. After making a Socratic discovery of his ignorance, Meno needs a Platonic reassurance about the hope of finding knowledge. Hence whereas Socratic dialectic taught him that he did not know what he thought he knew, Platonic Recollection functions to reassure him that he knows more than he thinks he knows. As the dialogue proceeds, “Socrates” tries to bring this reassurance home to Meno by doing something very un-Socratic: he embarks on an inquiry that arrives in the end at the right answer. This is the famous geometry lesson in which Socrates, asking just the right leading questions, gets Meno’s slave boy to recognize—or rather “recollect”—the truth of a piece of geometry that no one thought he knew. The first part of the geometry lesson deliberadly mimics the first part of the Meno, following the typical pattern of the Socratic dialectic of refutation, which, as Socrates archly points out in an aside to Meno, results in exactly the same sort of puzzlement that Meno himself had lately complained of.35 But then Socrates does the new, un-Socratic, Platonic thing: he leads the boy, who has just recognized his ignorance of geometry, to see the right answer—and concludes that he had it in him the whole time.
In this geometry lesson Plato is evidently pointing to a phenomenon we have all experienced, that moment of insight when we first glimpse with our mind’s eye the right answer, the truth that had been eluding us until now. And he wants to convince us that the reason we recognize its rightness is because we’ve seen it before. Hence the reason we can seek it is because the knowledge of it is in some way already in us, in our memories and in our souls, so that when we see it we can recognize it the way we recognize something once familiar but lately forgotten, when after long years we see it again. Thus Plato interprets the experience of insight as a kind of recollection.
But if the doctrine of Recollection is an interpretation of the phenomenon of insight, it is an interpretation that itself stands in need of explanation. Here more problems—yet more fruitful problems—turn up. To begin with, how did this knowledge come to be in our souls in the first place? What past is it that we are remembering when we recollect in this peculiar Platonic way? And how could we be so forgetful as not to realize this knowledge was present in our soul the whole time Socrates was refuting our preconceptions and leading us into perplexity?
It is important to realize that Plato’s answer to these questions develops over the course of his career. The earlier, less developed form of his answer is given in the Meno. Like so many of the solutions Plato finds for his unheard-of problems (problems that never arose in human thought before, because they are problems that no one before Plato ever got himself into) this one takes the form of a myth. It is a myth of transmigration and reincarnation of souls, borrowed from Greek religion and poetry. The story is that our soul is immortal, existing both before and after its time in the body—inhabiting in fact a whole series of bodies, each of which it enters at birth and leaves at death. So Plato’s suggestion is that if we ever find a good answer to one of Socrates’ questions, it will be because we recollect something we learned in a previous life but have since forgotten.
The doctrine of Recollection must be distinguished from this myth of Transmigration, which is supposed to explain it. For Recollection is an enduring Platonist doctrine, while Transmigration is, as an explanation, a failure. It explains how Platonic Recollection is possible but only at the cost of losing the whole point of the doctrine of Recollection, which was to show how it was possible to seek knowledge we didn’t already have. If our present search for knowledge is possible only because we learned in a previous life what we need to know, then Plato has only deferred the task of explaining how knowledge is possible, for he has yet to explain how it originated in that previous life.
Augustine makes this point tellingly, in a famous criticism:
The noble philosopher Plato wanted to persuade us that the souls of men lived here even before they bore these bodies, and hence that what is learned is recollected as something known, rather than known as something new. He relates that a certain boy, questioned about something in geometry, answered as if he were an expert in that discipline—for when questioned skillfully, step-by-step, he saw what was to be seen, and said what he saw. But if this recollection was of things known earlier, then after all not everyone, or hardly anyone, would be able to do this when questioned in this way. For not everyone was a geometer in a previous life, since geomters are rare enough in the human race to be rather hard to find. . . .36
Notice that this criticism strikes effectively against the myth of Transmigration rather than the doctrine of Recollection. It does not show that insight isn’t Recollection, but rather that Transmigration, even if it happened, wouldn’t explain the phenomenon of insight. Plato himself seems to be aware of this problem, for even in the Meno, when he restates the doctrine of Recollection it is in a way that evades Augustine’s criticism by pointing beyond transmigration. Discussing the meaning of the slave boy’s geometry lesson, Socrates draws out the implications of the doctrine of Recollection for the nature of the soul thus:
So if during the time when he was human and the time he was not, true opinions were in him, which were aroused by questioning and became knowledge, then has not his soul been learned for all time? 37
The time when the slave boy was “not human” means the periods when his soul is disembodied.38 But the point is that whether embodied or disembodied, his soul always already has knowledge or at least true opinion—it always has been learned, in the present perfect. The point is clearly meant to be general: this is the state of everyone’s soul. So one need not have been a geometer in a previous life in order to recollect knowledge of geometry, as Augustine alleges. The implication rather is that the knowledge we recollect, being present at all times in our souls, was not learned in time at all but somehow prior to all times—in eternity.
That implication is spelled out in Plato’s most fully developed account of Recollection, in the Phaedrus, where the myth of Transmigration is backed up by the myth of the Fall.39 While the Fall serves to explain how souls came to be trapped in bodies in the first place, what explains the possibility of human knowledge is the events before the Fall. Before they ever came into bodies, the souls that later were human kept company with the gods in heaven, contemplating eternal Forms that lay outside the very bounds of the universe. So this is how knowledge was first acquired: by intellectual vision, seeing the Forms with the eye of the mind long before there was an eye of the body to distract it and make it forget its inaugural vision. The myth is clearly meant to trace the soul’s origin back beyond time to eternity, so that the deathless realm to which the pure soul goes when separated from the body in death is the same realm from which it came in the beginning. The other world that is the soul’s destiny in the Phaedo is its origin in the Phaedrus.
Having enlarged the nature of the soul in the Meno, Plato was forced to deepen his account of its origin in the Phaedrus. Platonist Recollection enlarged the West’s conception of the nature of the soul, which then required a deeper explanation of its origin in the Platonist Fall—otherwise, there was no explaining how the soul first got the knowledge it recollects. This explanation of the soul’s origin, like the account of its destiny in the Phaedo, depended in turn on the existence of something prior to and more stable than the soul, which could be both its point of origin and its destination. Thus Platonic Recollection points to the soul’s Fall and Immortality, both of which are inconceivable without Platonic Forms. In this way Plato’s doctrine of the soul developed in tandem with his doctrine of the Forms, and especially with the development of their characteristic eternity and separation from the world of bodies. For the Forms are what the soul sees before embodiment, before time, before the fateful Fall from Being to Becoming.
Everything thus depends on the existence of the Forms and the soul’s ability to see them. This connection between soul and Form is a central theme of Plato’s middle dialogues, the Phaedo, the Republic, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus, and thence of the whole Platonist tradition. It was to this notion of kinship between soul and Form, based on the Forms being somehow visible to the soul, that Plato’s answer to Meno’s question eventually led—though Plato doubtless did not see exactly where he was going at the time he wrote the Meno. What he saw, I have been suggesting, is a problem. But as with all seminal thinkers, Plato’s problems were fruitful, in that their solutions led to yet more problems—new problems that required more new thoughts to solve them. The doctrine of Recollection arose as the solution to a problem about the grounds and meaning of Socratic inquiry, but it raised the new problem: if the knowledge we seek is already in our souls waiting to be recollected, then what kind of past do our souls have, in which they could have acquired such knowledge? The answer is that the soul’s past, its origin, is eternal, grounded in the unchanging Parmenidean world of the Forms.
The notion of unchanging Forms separated from the material world of time and change is not yet present in the Meno, but it is on its way. We can sense it coming just over the horizon in the refutation of Meno’s first definition of virtue, when Socrates insists that what their inquiry is after is not an example of this or that virtue but rather the one Form (eidos) that makes each of the many virtues a virtue. He states this as a kind of criterion of a good definition:
Even though there are many different virtues, they all have one and the same Form by which they are virtues, and this is the best thing to look at when answering someone who asks you to clarify what virtue is.40
Though there is no explicit reference in this passage to the immutability and eternity of the Form of Virtue, or its separation from this changing bodily world, later Platonists will naturally read it as a reference to a Platonic Form—and they will only be half wrong. If we imagine Plato himself rereading the Meno at about the time he was writing the Phaedo, he would clearly want to interpret the one Form Socrates is seeking here as the Platonic Form of Virtue. That is to say, in completing his account of the grounds and hopes of Socrates’ practice of dialectic, Plato is inevitably led to read a search for the Forms into the very marrow of Socratic inquiry—because, as we have seen, the doctrine of Recollection is ultimately dependent on the notion of Platonic Forms if it is to succeed in its task of rescuing Socratic inquiry from skepticism. Plato’s answer to Meno’s question is thus the beginning not only of Western inwardness but of the Platonist concept of intelligibility—the notion that there is a profound kinship between soul and eternal Form that gives the soul its possibilities and its nature, separating it from the perishable world of bodies in which it is imprisoned. Intelligibility, with all its implications for the nature of the soul, originates as the Platonist alternative to skeptical interpretations of Socrates.
For my purposes—and arguably for any purposes—intelligibility must count as the central concept not only of Plato’s middle period but of the whole millennia-long tradition of philosophical inquiry that has come to be called “Platonism.” (By this term I mean not merely a set of doctrines but a whole tradition of philosophical inquiry, in which there are serious disagreements between one thinker and another but also a common set of concepts, doctrines, and problems to disagree about. The term “intelligibility,” as I use it in this book, refers strictly to a concept within this tradition, not to any more general notion of intelligibility.) But if intelligibility, the kinship between soul and Form, is the backbone of Platonism, then Recollection looks less fundamental than it appeared in the Meno. For Recollection must itself be grounded on something logically prior, a present vision rather than a memory of the past. We can recollect the Forms only because in the beginning we saw them. And that means we might possibly see them again. The possibility of such vision is at the heart of Plato’s mature account of philosophical education in the Republic, where it is expounded most fully in the famous Allegory of the Cave.41 The contemplation of eternal Forms that was at the soul’s origin in the Phaedrus becomes the climax of its education in the Allegory of the Cave. Yet for both texts knowledge of the Forms is described rather simply, in terms of a metaphor that becomes fundamental for the entire Platonist tradition: the soul or mind “sees” intellible Forms, as the eye of the body sees visible things in the physical light of day. Intelligibility means the possibility of intellectual vision, in which the mind’s eye sees eternal things that are invisible to bodily vision.
The recognition that the notion of intellectual vision is fundamental to Platonism is the point of Augustine’s criticism of the Meno. Indeed, after rejecting the Platonic myth of Transmigration, Augustine proceeds to endorse the Platonic metaphor of vision.
We should believe instead that the nature of the intellectual mind is fashioned so as to see intelligible things in a certain unique kind of incorporeal light, being linked to them by the natural order the Artificer established.42
Augustine is doing more here than rejecting an unchristian myth. He is insisting that intelligibility be understood in terms of eternity rather than time. The phenomenon of insight into intelligible things may have the feel of Recollection and may even point back to a primal Fall of the soul (Augustine’s argument does not exclude either of these possibilities), but we must ultimately understand it not in terms of a temporal relationship between our present and our past, but rather as a form of eternal presence, a Light that is always present and shining and available for the intellect to see, if it is looking that way and is not blinded. Augustine is in effect demythologizing Plato, in a way that is quite in conformity with standard Neoplatonist practices of demythologization.43
By replacing myth with metaphor in this way, Augustine is aiming to get at what is fundamental, and for him there is nothing in the world more fundamental than the soul’s ability to see intelligible truths, for this is none other than the soul’s ability to see God, who is “the immutable Truth which contains all that is immutably true.”44 This metaphor in turn becomes fundamental for the next thousand years of Western Christianity, as theologians came to define ultimate human happiness as beatific vision—seeing God with the eye of the soul. But the metaphor is not without its own problems. It does not really explain intelligiblity but only compares it with visibility—that is, it likens intelligibility to precisely what it is not. From the Phaedo to the Confessions,45 Platonism insisted that seeing with the eye of the body is a hindrance to seeing with the eye of the mind, and that it is of the utmost importance to know the difference between the two. But that difference is precisely what a metaphor that likens them cannot elucidate.
This is one of the problems Plato left unsolved at his death. It is perhaps the central problem of the Platonist concept of intelligibility. Plato had pointed to the phenomenon of insight, proposing to interpret it through the doctrine of Recollection, an interpretation that in turn needed to be explained by a pair of myths (Transmigration, backed by the Fall) that were finally grounded on the metaphor of intellectual vision. This still leaves us far from a literal explanation of the intelligibility of the Forms that our minds seem to glimpse in the moment of insight. It took Plato’s greatest student to find a way of explaining intelligibility without myth or metaphor. This explanation was to become fundamental for Neoplatonist accounts of intelligibility, especially in Plotinus. If the concept of intelligibility is the backbone that gives structure to Platonism, then Aristotle’s identity theory of knowledge is the spinal nerve that gives life to Plotinian Neoplatonism and its original form of inwardness. Yet despite his deep fascination with Plotinus’s inward turn, Augustine never saw this central nerve hidden in its backbone, as he knew nothing of its Aristotelian source. This ignorance, together with his Christian convictions, gave him new problems to solve, which led eventually to a new form of inwardness quite different from that of Plotinus. This central and hidden feature of Plotinian inwardness is what we must examine in the next chapter.