I dealist theories1 assume that immaterial structures animate and organize all that exists. These structures can be Plato’s “Ideas.” In other forms of Idealism, like the ones that enlivened Galileo’s and Newton’s scientific discoveries, scientists mostly hypothesize that all the mechanisms of the universe structure themselves according to a “natural logic”2 that mathematicians attempt to express formally.
For soul is so entwined through the veins,
The flesh, the thews, the bones, that even the teeth
Share in sensation, as proven by dull ache,
By twinge from icy water, or grating crunch
Upon a stone that got in mouth with bread.
Wherefore, again, again, souls must be thought
Nor void of birth, nor free from law of death;
Nor, if, from outward, in they wound their way,
Could they be thought as able so to cleave
To these our frames, nor, since so interwove,
Appears it that they’re able to go forth
Unhurt and whole and loose themselves unscathed
From all the thews, articulations, bones.
(Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 1998, Book III, 691–697, translated by William Ellery Leonard3)
Philosophical Idealism attempts to provide a foundation to the conscious impression that there exists an absolute Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. It is useful to have a clear vision of what Idealism proposes because this trend permeates all forms of European thought; it influences all the cultures that integrate the lifestyles proposed by the Europeans, such as the United States. We find Idealistic trends from Judaism and from Islam. This mode of thought is found in many schools of psychotherapy. For example, the schools of Carl Gustav Jung and of Wilhelm Reich often use an Idealistic frame of mind. Given the importance of Reich in body psychotherapy, it may be helpful to outline this way of thinking.
It is sometimes difficult to detect Idealism explicitly. After Plato, many philosophers presented themselves as being opposed to Idealism. Yet most of their propositions were subsequently classified as variations of omnipresent Idealism in Judeo-Christian cultures. It is therefore interesting to understand why so many brilliant intellectuals, like Marx and Nietzsche, present themselves as an alternative to an Idealism that they detest, and why they nevertheless ended up proposing convictions tainted with Idealism. This chapter presents a few reasons for the popularity of these ideas, as well as some arguments to explain the hatred evoked by Idealism.
My impression is that explicit conscious procedures can only function if they can assume that, at a given moment, there exists but one truth. A person needs to have the intimate conviction that the words she uses have but the sense she attributes to them, even though her intellect knows that terms are always polysemous. As a philologist, Nietzsche was an expert in the analysis of words.4 He insists on the fact that human functioning is such that it is impossible for words not to have many meanings: they are polysemous. This is especially true when they designate abstracts entities like good and evil. For Nietzsche, the idea that such terms could only have one meaning, one signifier, as the Idealists propose, can only be imposed on a human population by tyrannies. Nietzsche’s position, strengthened by research that I will discuss, demonstrates that there exist many ways of thinking inscribed in the architecture of the mind,5 and consequently, it is impossible to associate one style of mental practice and knowledge to a term (or signifier).
It is useful to begin this discussion on philosophy with Plato, for the following reasons:
Idealist schools have presented a variety of theories on how body and mind associate. Here are a few examples that are discussed in this volume:
The general plan of the following sections on the philosophers begins with a divine soul, capable of flying like a god in a heavenly and pure world. It then takes us finally to Hume’s materialism where thoughts are managed like a computer or a prayer wheel that generate ideas arbitrarily.
But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he who affirms that self-motion is the very idea and essence of the soul will not be put in confusion. For the body which is moved from without is soulless; but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. But if this be true, must not the soul be the self-moving, and therefore of necessity unbegotten and immortal? (Plato, 1937, Phaedrus, 245a, p. 250)6
. . .
And besides,
If soul immortal is, and winds its way
Into the body at the birth of man,
Why can we not remember something, then,
Of life-time spent before? Why keep we not
Some footprints of the things we did of, old?
(Lucretius, Of the Nature of Things, 1998, III. 670–674, translated by William Ellery Leonard7)
To describe what the soul actually is would require a very long account, altogether a task for a god in every way; but to say what it is like is humanly possible and takes less time. (Introduction to Plato, 1937, by Cooper, Phaedrus, 246a, p. 524)
To present his version of Idealism, Plato (Athens, 427–348 BC) uses stories halfway between the fables and myths that he invented.8 A theory is generally a succession of formulations that constitute a logical and coherent development. In antiquity, many writers preferred to use a parable that allowed the reader to acquire an intuitive sense of the general outline of a way of thinking. It permitted the expression of an intimate conviction on a subject without having already acquired the means to refine the details of what one understands. On the other hand, it makes it difficult to differentiate between reasoning and an emotional commitment. That partly explains the confusion between forms of thinking (knowledge, ideology, belief, etc.) that characterizes Idealism.9
Aristotle, Plato’s student, tried to transform Idealism into an explicit system.10 That obliged him to make pronouncements on a number of questions that could not yield any useful answers at that time. His way of thinking became one of the bases of the debates as vain as the ones by Byzantine theologians as to the sex of angels.
When Socrates (Athens, ca. 469–399 BC), Plato’s master, was condemned to death by the Athenian populace, Plato was manifestly shocked.11 This shock permitted him to take a leap and imagine his Idealistic theory. His theory is a mixture of the thoughts of Socrates and Pythagoras added to his own thoughts. He wrote three dialogues on the death of Socrates. In the first, the Apology of Socrates, respectful of his master, he puts forth what his master probably said at his trial. Socrates ends his defense by envisioning two forms of death.12 He does not know which one awaits him, but both seem liberating to him:
In the last of the dialogues concerning the death of Socrates, the Phaedo, Plato shows him in prison at the moment when he is about to drink the hemlock in front of his students. He puts words in his teacher’s mouth and has him tell the fable that establishes his own Idealism.13 This fable could let one think that Plato knows what happens after death. But it is more probable that this vision, inspired by Pythagoras, was proposed for pedagogical purposes and not to describe what really happens:
At the death of a body, the soul which it contained, flies toward a mysterious region, perfect and pure, and enters into contact with the Ideas. These Ideas make it possible to experience what is True, Beautiful, Good, and Just. Liberated from the constraints imposed by the body, the soul can gather nectar in this garden of truths. Finally, at long last, sadly, it must be “enshrined” again in a body, where it is imprisoned like an oyster in its shell.14 However, the soul retains the memory of the voyage and of what she has learned.15
Any meaning given to what happens comes from us. We are facing the difficult task of translating natural processes into psychological language. (Jung, 1940, Children’s dreams, seminar 1, p. 2)
Plato does not define the soul. He seems to refer to a myth that is known to his readers. The soul can enter and leave the body, which she animates; but she remains distinct from the body. Thereby, Plato does not propose a psychology, as he supposed that everybody assumes that the part of us that feels and thinks is part of the body and not the soul.
With Plato, the relationship between the soul and thoughts is complex. The soul animates the body and the thoughts; but she does not transmit her content to consciousness. Most humans do not consciously know that they have a soul, or they suppose it without really knowing it. On the other hand, the soul can be apprehended by our thoughts in dreams and intuitions that are sort of emanations of the soul. There is no such thing as direct messages from the soul that reformulate themselves into thoughts. In the Idealistic writings of Plato, Socrates becomes a mouthpiece for Plato. His teaching consists in learning how to self-explore to apprehend the shape of the emanations of the soul, so as to reconstruct in consciousness ideas as identical as possible to the ones contained in the soul. This model implies three stages of knowing:
Even though Plato does not broach this problem explicitly, he probably thinks that the soul does not have as many resources as the world of Ideas, and that the mind does not have as many resources as the soul. This implies that no philosopher has the means to formulate what emanates from the world of Ideas. The human faculty to think does not have the tools to really comprehend the Truths of the soul and give them expression. Explicit theories (philosophical, religious, scientific, etc.) are constructed by a consciousness that does not have the capacity to apprehend and express eternal Truths. However, metaphors and fables can at least convey an intuitive sense of these truths.
We thus had, in the Athens of those days, two kinds of theories:
In psychotherapy, even Freud’s theory can be situated halfway between the strategies of Plato and Aristotle. That is why I refer to them as metaphorical theories. They consist of “metaphorical models” of observable phenomena that are not close enough to the data to be considered laws, but are useful to guide the therapist’s interventions and the patient’s representations. “The unconscious,” “defense systems,” and “muscular armoring” are examples of what I call metaphorical notions.
The greatest difficulty that we have in writing about Socrates is that he did not write anything. We only know of him by what others have said.17 Our main source on what Socrates was like is Plato. A first myth about Socrates is that Plato’s first writings give us a more faithful image of Socrates than his later writings. The “Socratic” dialogues were written while Socrates was alive, before Plato became an Idealist and before he began to speak of the soul and body. That platonic Socrates gradually became an emblematic figure in psychotherapy, a sort of precursor of and model for many psychotherapists.18 This Socrates is presented to us like a sort of hygienist of the mind, like a hunter of false truths, a demand to think as honestly as possible. This Socrates takes up the message of the wise men from the Orient and founds a philosophy based on the proposition that all theories contain a fragment of truth, and consequently, the pretense to have the truth is false. This type of skepticism is a foundation stone for philosophers such as Hume and Kant. It does not consist in teaching a thought but in acquiring the courage to not believe that we know when we do not know. Socrates claimed that he was more intelligent than most because he knew that he knows nothing.19
Francois Roustang, a French psychotherapist, isolates the following factors in Plato’s Socratic dialogues:20
In psychotherapy, reference is made mostly to that vision of Socrates. For many people, he is the icon of the honest philosopher who is persecuted because he annihilates all manipulation of knowledge, and because people are afraid of someone who brings their imposture to the light of day. As a young man and not yet an Idealist, Plato perhaps imagined that the search for truth was this aspect of Socrates that he describes in his first works. Later on, he develops an Idealism that was probably also part of Socrates’s teaching. People change. Certainly Plato greatly changed in the course of his life. It is probable that Socrates also evolved, and that he developed a varied set of approaches.
We know that Socrates was not only an individual who liked to ask questions of those he encountered on the street. He was also a master and the head of a school. For Plato, his teacher had as his mission to help his students better understand the messages of the soul, messages that appeared to consciousness in the form of vague intuitions, by trying to make them more explicit in a form the human spirit could more easily employ. Contemporary psychotherapists, like Roustang (2009), admire a Socrates who is mainly a hygienist of the mind; but it is probable that the real Socrates was more complex and more ambiguous than that.
The Socrates of the psychotherapists addresses himself uniquely to individuals without proposing socially constructed enterprises (political, theoretical, moral, etc.). The Socrates of psychotherapists, like Roustang, distinguishes a Socratic therapy from a Platonic therapy in the following manner. Plato wants to treat the being (or the subject or the soul), whereas Socrates is content to reach that in which a person “excels, his quality, his particular virtue, where his activity attains it perfection, its fullness” (Roustang, 2009, 2, p. 50, translated by Marcel Duclos).
For this, he uses a pedagogy that has served as a model for numerous psychotherapists. In the writings of Plato, Socrates’s strategy can be broken down into three phases:
Only the first strategy—that of the torpedo—can be associated with the Socrates who hunts down prejudice (that which is judged even before the start of the conversation). The second strategy is taken up by the psychotherapists who are idealists, who assume that there exists a fundamental self, a human being’s authentic center.
This first portrait of Socrates was the first great philosophical myth that Plato proposed to humanity. What Plato offers us is a representation of the philosophical inquiry, of the searching philosopher. There is nonetheless a commonality between psychotherapists and young Plato’s Socrates: the necessity to destabilize and cleanse the mind of its prejudices so that it can perceive with enlightened clarity what is really happening around and within oneself. This fundamental overture remains young Plato’s essential message. To then decide that this overture ought to focus on the messages of the unconscious mind, of the soul’s hidden wisdom, is already the beginning of a closure. Such closure is sometimes necessary. An individual cannot open himself up to everything and assimilate it. Thus there is a necessity to choose what is important at a given moment: a choice that differentiates the exploration in psychotherapy, the exploration in philosophy, or the exploration in meditation. If an individual goes from the exploration of his mind to that of his soul, he must first clean his mental glasses, because each form of self-exploration implies a well-established habit that fosters a focus on certain inner dynamics of the self. Thus, being able to free associate, as Freud would propose 2,400 years later, is to try to eliminate all forms of mental prejudices and let spring forth in word all that takes shape in the mind. I notice that often those who subject themselves to this discipline rarely become sensitive to what opens up in meditation; the inverse is equally true. To open oneself by following one method inevitably leads to the establishment of a way of thinking and perceiving. The mind becomes particularly sensitive to certain inner dynamics and develops intellectual structures better able to appreciate them. All of this is put in place, thanks to a regular practice. Plato, who believes in only one kind of true thought, does not pay attention to the formation of these mental habits. All the same, his Socrates is a startling example that is it impossible to not become, with experience, a heap of mannerisms that sometimes resemble tics. There is a Socratic style, a Socratic irony,22 a Socratic way to perplex the other, and a Socratic form of inquiry that is found in almost all of Plato’s early dialogues. Only later does Plato present a Socrates who will sometimes have a healing and hospitable voice. However, this version, we are told, would be more Plato than Socrates.
In the Greek language, the psyche is that force of the soul that generates thoughts, behaviors, and a personality.23 Plato situates these dynamics outside of the soul. It disappears when the organism dies.
In the Meno, Socrates demonstrates that he can help a young, uneducated slave discover in himself the rules of geometry and mathematics.24 At first, the questions reveal the young adolescent’s vague intuition of the properties of a triangle and the square root. The adolescent is able to intuitively respond correctly with a yes or a no to Socrates’s questions without any explicit understanding of the rules of mathematics known to Meno and to Socrates. Yet gradually, these rules begin to rise up out of the haze like a volcano out of the ocean to create an island. With this demonstration, Socrates wants to suggest that after an advanced education, it is not one or two islands that break the surface of consciousness but entire continents of truths. This is labeled a process of reminiscence.25 I remember what my soul acquired in the world of Ideas.
This strategy is used in psychotherapy to help a person become conscious of what is within, what is repressed, or one’s intimate wishes. Socrates serves as a model that inspires certain psychotherapists to question a patient in great detail until he becomes more conscious, more explicit with regard to one of his organismic practices. The psychotherapist proposes to the patient that he comprehend, in as a detailed a manner as possible, an aspect of his negative impulses, his needs, and his resources.
In this section,26 I summarize certain aspects of Plato’s thinking that influenced many school of psychotherapy. It will consist of showing that the mind is different from the content of the soul because the mind can only digest truths in small doses. In psychotherapy, we often notice that an individual can handle just a limited amount of truth at one time. Every time I try to move at a faster pace, often at the request of the patient, he is soon overwhelmed and disoriented. What Freud called the defense system brings any acceleration of information to a screeching halt. The patient experiences strong disease and may want to end psychotherapy. It is not necessarily that the individual no longer wants to gain self-knowledge. He just cannot integrate a powerful dose of new information.27 A schoolchild has the same difficulty at school, as does a new employee who is bombarded with instructions by the employer.
Idealists often think not only that the mind has quantitative limits but also that the Ideas are of another nature than what the mind can manage. The mind must transform itself before it can integrate this type of information. The ordinary citizen who accidently perceives a Truth may not notice the value of what he has just experienced. If, on the other hand, the defenses are too weak, the mind risks blowing a fuse when it perceives a dose of truth that it cannot manage. In subsequent pages, we shall see that Plato used his myth of the cave to show the importance of avoiding becoming blind when the mind enters into contact with the Truths of the soul.
A text is a text only if it hides at first view, for any one, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. Besides, a text always remains imperceptible. The law and the rule do not shelter themselves in the inaccessibility of a secret. They simply never reveal themselves, in the present, to anything that we can rigorously call a perception. (Jacques Derrida, 1972, Plato’s Pharmacy, p. 79; translated by Marcel Duclos)
The recourse to fables shows that Plato does not have the intellectual means to explicitly define Beauty, but he trusts that he has an adequate intuition about what is beautiful and ugly. He has a difficult time translating what he feels into a structured discourse. I think his difficulty is part and parcel of the human condition. Plato experiences a celebratory inner itch every time someone says something that seems just and an almost hateful inner irritation when someone preaches something that seems manifestly false. With his theory of the Ideas, he tries to show that it is possible to gain understanding and that consequently, the human daring to invest in the scientific endeavor defines an attempt to construct a social knowledge of the mechanisms that animate the universe. The theory of the Ideas is there to tell us that in the human there is a capacity to reflect on what is perceived. Plato wanted, in this way, to support people like Aristotle, who was building the bases of an emerging science by battling against a skepticism that discourages those who would have the hubris to understand that which makes them alive. Plato made this audacious challenge by discovering a plausible theory for his day which affirms that each human has the means to know something, to construct an understanding that corresponds to a reality. He could not have done better to express this intimate conviction than to invent this fable, according to which, between two lives, our souls float in the world of the Ideas.
THE DANGERS OF SOCIAL PROCEDURES
Plato imagines that there exist kernels of innate knowledge, but any one of these kernels are of little worth if not animated by a sharp, intuitive awareness of ideas. The difficulty lies in that the support brought forth by the society for such an enterprise must be managed with precaution, because it can also falsify (to support political, ideological, and economic projects, for example) the psychic perception of the Truths of the soul. The ability to listen to one’s intuitions presumes a refined apprenticeship. This is why “know thyself” is so important to Plato. Without it we could not develop our capacity to evaluate the relevance of what is presented to us as a truth. Becoming aware of what ideas we would like to support is, for Plato, the key to knowledge; this key only turns in the lock if the subject experiences pleasure when a Truth is perceived. In the Meno, Plato allows an adolescent to confront the representations brought about by lazy conscious thinking and helps him feel a celebratory pleasure each time he can correct what is represented in function of what is rightly experienced. This dialogue between conscious thought and profound intuition is the constant preoccupation of philosophers.
Plato defended, as a high stake, the social construction of knowledge.28 Even if the nuclei of consciousness are principally regulated by the nonconscious mechanisms of regulation that coordinate the social, psychological, and biological dimensions, only through individual thought and explicit interactions between citizens can knowledge be actualized. This form of co-constructed intelligence permits today’s reader to refine the questions and answers raised by Plato.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND WRITING
With the evolution of language, this faith in culturally transmitted information became vulnerable to exploitation by individuals. (Scott Atran, 2010, “The Evolution of Religion”)
One of the examples that Plato gives about the acquisition of a consciousness that allows for the creation of explicit transmissible content is that of writing. He proposes a fable on the origin of writing in Timaeus (21–26). This fable would have been passed on from father to son in his family since the time when the great Athenian politician Solon related it to one of Plato’s ancestors:
One day in Egypt, Solon enters a city allied to Athens. He tells the Greek legend about the origin of the world to an assembled group. A listener politely laughs. He is one of the Egyptian High Priests. He explains that one of the traumas of Greece is to have been often devastated by natural catastrophes and by war that, each time, destroyed everything that they wrote. In contrast, peaceful Egypt possesses manuscripts that exist since the origin of writing. According to the priest, the Egyptian texts recount events that the Greeks ignore, like the history of the city Atlantis, founded 9,000 years before Athens. When this city was destroyed by ocean waves, some survivors fled to Greece and founded Athens.
In this fable, Plato shows that writing adds capacities to individual memory that do not exist in the brain.
Plato expresses in Phaedrus his distrust of writing that can just as easily transmit fables, the reasoning of the sophists, lies, or truths. Writing and speech are therefore tools that can be used, with more or less reliability, to support propaganda or by the seekers of truth. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1972) points out that for Plato, writing and medication have the same status, in that they both have an undeniable utility but can also inhibit the desire to explore and use the forces of the soul. During the same period in China, Chuang Tzu expressed an analogous distrust:
But until the sage is dead, great thieves will never cease to appear, and if you pile on more sages in hopes of bringing the world to order, you will only be pilling up more profit for Robber Chih. Fashion pecks and bushels for people to measure by and they will steal by peck and bushel.29 Fashion scales and balances for people to weigh by and they will steal by scales and balance. Fashion tallies and seals to insure trustworthiness and people will steal with tallies and seals. Fashion benevolence and righteousness to reform people and they will steal with benevolence and righteousness. How do I know this is so? He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be the feudal lord—and we all know that benevolence and righteousness are to be found at the gates of the feudal lords. (Chuang Tzu, 1968, X, p. 109f)
The relationship between these two nearly contemporary points of view makes me think that in China as well as in Greece, the introduction of new technologies posed the same kind of philosophical problems, even if the cultures were profoundly different. Indeed, the Taoist argument states that people knew how to estimate the weight of a commodity by holding it in their hands. After the invention of weights, people had such confidence in the system of measures that they no longer bothered to develop their capacity to estimate weight with their hands. It then became easy to steal by falsifying the instruments of measure. It is the same with written laws. People end up not learning how to evaluate for themselves what is good and just. This is what makes it possible for villains who take over a state to manage the justice system at will and for dishonest religious authorities to use the few saints that exist to justify doubtful religious practices. When people lose contact with their own profound resources, they become subject to manipulation because they easily notice the existence of petty thieves but they are not capable of experiencing as pernicious and dangerous those who rob them blind through the manipulation of social rituals and political power.
Plato’s Socrates, in The Republic, teaches that most citizens, even those who are educated, do not achieve an integration of their intuition of what is Good; but they are often responsive to examples of what is Good.30 It is the same for Truth and knowledge. Socrates uses the myth of the cave31 (see the following summary) to illustrate the difficulty that most citizens experience when they try to contact the Ideas:
Socrates describes persons facing the inner far wall of a cave like spectators facing the screen in a cinema. On that wall, they see moving shadows. As at the cinema, the citizen quickly forgets that what is happening comes from a projector situated behind him. He forgets that what he perceives is produced by mechanisms situated outside of his consciousness. Plato describes a scene in which the projector is in fact the sun that casts as a shadow that which is happening behind the spectators. If a spectator suddenly turns around to see what is going on at the entrance of the cave, he is immediately blinded by the sun. This explains why the spectators content themselves with what they see on the screen, and end up believing that what they perceive is the reality. Occasionally, passers-by enter the cave and explain to the spectators, who are prisoners of their fears, that once outside, the sun becomes less blinding, and reality directly perceptible. A spectator cannot directly go from the obscurity of the cave to the light of day without definitively blinding oneself. However, proceeding with a method, he can gradually get accustomed to the increasing intensity of the light. He will first perceive the real starry night, then the dawn and the sunrise, and finally everything that exists.
In the first part of the myth of the cave, Plato explains why he cannot be more explicit when he communicates with persons who have not learned how to get out of the cave, and he presents himself as one of those who knows how to get out. Having said that, he admits that we can only perceive a fraction of what is.
A psychotherapist does not hold such a black and white Manichaean view of the dynamics of human nature. Jung suggests that the shadows projected on the cave’s rock wall are more than a simple reflection of reality,32 because they form another reality that merits as much consideration—that is, the psyche and the impressions it produces. The portrait proposed by a painter is never the exact copy of a face because it is also a creative act that seeks to produce a vision. Art is a domain unto itself. It has its own relevance. So do the shadows on Plato’s cave! For Jung, the fact that the psychic elaborations are not conforming copies of what is perceived takes nothing away from the wonder he feels when he studies the extraordinary construction that is the human capacity to think. To hope that the mind can capture Ideas, such as they exist, is to expect of the human spirit that it be transparent and neutral: a kind of leech that has, as its only task, that of stuffing itself with celestial nourishment. If an organism develops systems of defense and of protection, like the immune system, it is because it wants to survive. To seek to know whether one’s life is good or bad, useful or not, pertinent or not, is a luxury that is not one of the priorities of the dynamics of life, notably of human organisms.
Religious people would like it if God became each person’s highest goal; a philosopher like Plato would like it if Truth became the highest goal of every human organism. The psychotherapist is content to support a person for whom life is far too uncomfortable and help him find the type of understanding that he needs to improve his life. The Jungian psychotherapist has a deep respect for all of the productions of the mind. He understands the necessity that humans have to transform their environment into digestible shadows, projected onto the screen of the interior cinema. To seek to modify a person’s internal cinema inevitably passes through a deconstruction that aims at a reconstruction: one that is more able to defend what is at stake in one’s life. He would like to transform the black and white film of a depressed patient into one containing the full array of colors and the saturated colors of neurotic thoughts into vivid film full of contrasts. The psychotherapist is endlessly confronted by individuals who are blinded by their unshakable faith in the perception they have about what happened to them.
Some people, to whom we always feel strangely attracted, seem to live out of a greater inner richness. Basically everyone has it; the problem is that most of us don’t know about it. The practical work of gradually discovering this inner richness is the substance of our teaching. (Charlotte Selver & Charles V. W. Brooks, 1980, “Sensory Awareness,” p. 117)
One must note the widespread practice of interrupting children’s play as though it were of no importance. Through this, children come to feel that there is no natural rhythm in things, and that it is right for activities to be cut off in mid-air. . . . When children have been interrupted often enough, their innate sense of rhythm becomes confused; as well as their sense of the social value of their own experience. (Selver & Brooks, 1980, “Sensory Awareness,” p. 117)
Idealism admits only one form of relativism: that an individual consciousness can be more or less intensely in contact with the truths of the soul, and consequently be more or less rational and have more or less good taste. The diverse forms of Idealism that we encounter in body psychotherapy are often related to diverse forms of spirituality. Biosynthesis, Biodynamic psychology, and Core energetics are influential examples.33 Their brand of Idealism leads them to propose expressions such as “the unconscious knows,” “the body never lies,” or “the body knows.” The body, the organism, and the unconscious are then equivalent terms to designate the nonconscious dynamics that animate our thoughts.
These authors (notably David Boadella, Gerda Boyesen, and John Pierrakos) postulate that each organism contains a soul, defined here as a nucleus of natural forces, of cosmic vitality. According to them, there exists in everyone a part of their being that knows, that is true, that is good, that is incapable of lying, and that would allow an individual to act in harmony with his real and profound needs and with those in his intimate circle and of nature.34 The universe is conceived as a perfect entity, without any malice, seeking a coherence that harmonizes everything it contains. The soul is thus this part of nature that animates the organism. These authors then develop their arguments to show that a being’s center is often inhibited by social factors that pervert the rapport that an individual entertains with the depth of his nature. Psychotherapy would then have the goal of restoring this profound link with the primary nature of the organism. What is difficult to understand in the writings of these authors, as well as in Plato, is how this nature could have brought about this destructive influence of societies. We find, in this, the same questions that children ask themselves about why an all-powerful God authorized the existence of the devil and of so much pain.
Now of all motions that is the best which is produced in a thing by itself, for it is most akin to the motion of thought and of the universe; but that motion which is caused by others is not so good, and worst of all is that which moves the body, when at rest, in parts only and by some external agency. Wherefore of all modes of purifying and re-uniting the body the best is gymnastic; the next best is a surging motion, as in sailing or any other mode of conveyance which is not fatiguing; the third sort of motion may be of use in a case of extreme necessity, but in any other will be adopted by no man of sense: I mean the purgative treatment of physicians; for diseases unless they are very dangerous should not be irritated by medicines, since every form of disease is in a manner akin to the living being, whose complex frame has an appointed term of life. . . . And this holds also of the constitution of diseases; if any one regardless of the appointed time tries to subdue them by medicine, he only aggravates and multiplies them. Wherefore we ought always to manage them by regimen, as far as a man can spare the time, and not provoke a disagreeable enemy by medicines. (Plato, 1937, Timaeus, III, 89a, p. 65)
Idealism places in the depths of the world of Ideas, not only Truths but also a power to heal. We could find the quote from Timaeus in a number of texts on natural medicine or homeopathy. There would be in each one of us a restorative given that knows what we ought to do to get better. This vision is close to that of Jung, for whom “the general function of dreams is to attempt to reestablish our psychological equilibrium with the help of an oneiric material that, in a subtle way, reconstitutes the total equilibrium of our psyche” (Jung, 1961, p. 75, my translation).
This way of thinking, which we find in the writings of Reich in his last years, has often activated in the psychotherapeutic community a reaction akin to that of the Athenians in the face of Socrates: a mixture of admiration for an undeniable gift and a refusal to accept that such a power really exists. Some psychotherapists think that when a person renders the unconscious conscious, not only the psyche functions better, but so do all the other dynamics of the organism. The body psychotherapists who adopt this point of view sometimes have the ability to lead persons into near trance-like states that mobilize the total organism and that have an immense intensity of astoundingly intermingled joy and sorrow. These experiences have a hypnotic impact. Patients who live these experiences subsequently have a clear impression of having made contact with their depth, that they are no longer alone, and to have found within themselves a serene vitality that will accompany them for the rest of their lives.
The platonic soul brings to the mind organizing principles elaborated during her voyages to the land of Ideas. She conveys a body of knowledge developed beyond the human species that cannot be created by individuals. These Truths have been set before an individual’s birth, and the individual’s thoughts have no impact on their content. For a number of psychotherapists who are Idealists, Plato’s interpretation of the soul is a metaphor that has permitted humans to become more conscious of the fact that their mind has transpersonal35 or supra-ordinate36 content. This is the content that led Jung to the notion of the collective unconscious.37 Ervin Laszlo38 even goes so far as to speak of a pan-mind, or pan-psyche, that is, a global knowledge that is rooted in every cell.
A more academic vision of the transpersonal mechanisms defines them as elaborations that influence an individual psyche but have not been created or elaborated by it. At most, a person can only add a nuance to the general structure. Once this definition is accepted, one can distinguish several forms of “transpersonal” contents:
Plato’s fable has the benefit of not proposing a plausible explanation on the origin and the functioning of transpersonal forces. It contents itself to make people attentive to the phenomenon by making them aware that these impressions have a massive impact on how an individual thinks. Those that use the term transpersonal often have the tendency to suggest “explanations” of this phenomenon that are finally more fanciful than Plato’s fables.
What I retain from the term transpersonal is the idea that an individual feels forces within himself that he has not built in the course of his life that also enliven most of the people that surround him. That sentiment is active from birth, and is encouraged by almost all educators worldwide. It is also active in the sense that an individual has the impression of participating in the animation of what animates him. For example, I am formed by the social world that surrounds me, but I also actively participate in what this social life becomes. It is therefore possible to distinguish two types of transpersonal thoughts:
Plato’s Symposium describes a banquet that is the second in a series of celebrations organized by the very rich Athenian poet Agathon to celebrate the literary prize that he recently won. What is at hand is a prestigious prize given for the best tragedy of the year 416 BC. This banquet gathers illustrious Athenians, such as Socrates, the general Alcibiades, and the author Aristophanes. The first banquet has been so sumptuous that this time the guests prefer to drink and eat less and spend more time presenting their homage to the god of love, Eros:
Vignette on The Symposium. The first orator is called Phaedrus. He presents Eros as one of the most ancient and powerful gods. Eros gives humans the possibility to love each other, and thus to live in a paradisiacal and reparative emotional state in a world often difficult to handle.
The second orator, Pausanias, distinguishes two form of love. The first is a love between two souls, without doubt what Phaedrus was speaking about. The second is an attraction between bodies that often lead to a moral decline of the soul.
The homage delivered by the third orator, the physician Eryximachus, is the one that interests us here. Phaedrus had presented Eros as one of the most ancient and powerful gods of the universe. To believe that he only occupies himself with the amorous sentiments of individual humans is not, consequently, doing him justice. The amorous sentiments are but a human expression of the fundamental forces that regulate the relations between all that exists in the universe: galaxies, stars, plants, animals, organs, atoms, and so on. Eros is therefore a force of the universe. As Pausanias has shown, Eros creates intense and creative links between the elements of the cosmos, whereas Chaos, born just before Eros, creates destructive links between all that exist. Phaedrus has already showed how the birth of Eros repaired the damage caused by his older brother. In medicine, Eros is the force that regulates a constructive attraction between the elements of a body and what allows for a healthy life; whereas Chaos deregulates the attractions and the pleasures of the body and renders everything unwell. This perspective shows that the constructive and destructive forces of human love are animated by such powerful universal forces that we can now understand the importance of Eros, who is one of the principal gods of medicine.43 Eros is therefore not only the god of love, of the attraction between atoms, but also of healing.
Eryximachus thus describes the therapeutic act as a way of supporting the influence of Eros. This proposition has had a considerable influence on all of the therapists influenced by Idealism. The duty of the physician is to reinforce the harmony between the elements of the body and foster the birth of a state of love and harmony in an organism torn apart by discordant forces. This task is difficult to the extent that there exist numerous elements that have contradictory functions in an organism, like cold and hot, bitter and sweet, wet and dry. It is not possible to contemplate that blood would become dry like a bone or bones fluid like blood. That is why it requires enormous experience before a physician can become able to restore all of the dissimilar elements of the organism into lovers of one another.
Harmony needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman. (43)
From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony. (46)
The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow. Therefore, good and ill are one. (56)
(Heraclitus, 2001, Fragments)
For Eryximachus, the power of Eros manifests itself in the same manner in music and medicine. According to him, the composer has the mission to harmonize the high and low notes. The harmony established between the high and the low notes creates the musical event by overcoming an initial opposition.44 The creation of a musical chord is thus another way to honor Eros. Eryximachus is so intent on finding harmony between all things that he attempts to include Heraclitus’s thought into his own:
For he says that The One is united by disunion, like the harmony of the bow and the lyre. Now there is an absurdity in saying that harmony is discord or is composed of elements which are still in a state of discord. But what he probably meant was, that harmony is composed of differing notes of higher and lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music; for if the higher and lower notes still disagreed, there could be no harmony. (Plato, The Symposium, 187a and b, p. 314)
Heraclitus also uses a dialectical approach toward reality (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) and thinks that man is but a pale reflection of the potential that animates the universe. However, for Heraclitus, managing disharmony is often even more creative (even more healthy) than reaching a harmonious state. He could also have said that conflicts can become a particularly creative form of harmony. He thus rather announces a form of reasoning that we will find when we will speak of Hume and Darwin. For Heraclitus, Chaos’s work (the antithesis) is as important and crucial for the evolution of the universe (the synthesis) than that of Eros (the thesis). The conflicting dialectic dynamic between Eros and Chaos allows for the emergence of the emotion of love, desire, creativity, and music. This unceasing battle structures the organism and reinforces it. Briefly, if Heraclitus had been a therapist, he sometimes would have put oil on the inner conflicts of a soul, so that she might strengthen herself and learn to manage the conflicts of existence with greater ease.
Before becoming a student of Socrates, Plato had studied with Cratylus, a student of Heraclitus. Later, Plato wrote a dialogue in which he imagines Socrates trying to explain to Cratylus why Heraclitus is wrong and he, Socrates, is right. In this dialogue, titled Cratylus or Of the Uprightness of Words, Socrates and Cratylus discuss the meaning of words. Socrates thinks that words have a meaning, or that at least certain words like goodness or beauty have a precise meaning, that is not immediately accessible to comprehension but can be discovered. Plato’s Socrates attacks the idea that Heraclitus expresses when he writes that we can never bathe twice in the same river. If everything changes and is in a perpetual flux, it is impossible to have words that have a meaning:
Socrates: Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that there is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there will always be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known. (Plato, 1937, Cratylus, 440a and b, p. 229)
This is the dilemma. Eryximachus certainly speaks of dialectics, but of dialectics that envisage only two types of organizations: harmonious and disharmonious. Harmonious organizations favor the emergence of a state of health, happiness, pleasure, and love that leads to the most sacred dimensions of life. Disharmonious organizations lead to hatred, illness, chaos, and the destruction of all that humans have tried to create. In other words, Eryximachus relates harmony to “good” and discord to “evil.” Heraclitus, on the other hand, supposes that the same elements can be organized in multiple ways, notably harmonious and conflicted, and that from each type of organization can emerge creative and destructive dialectics:
Even though by temperament I find myself more at ease with the thinking of Heraclitus than that of Plato, my experience does not permit me to eliminate an approach to the detriment of another. They both have their utility and their limits. In music, for example, I adore the seeking for harmony that I hear in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, and I am fascinated by Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring that contains nothing other than dissonance.
Eryximachus’s discourse also raises a long list of questions for psychotherapists, notably these:
On these questions, it is possible for me to sketch the outlines of a few responses that have accompanied me over the years and have been useful in my practice of psychotherapy.
THE DIFFERENCE OF POTENTIAL AND INTERACTION
Paul Boyesen (1993) taught the following model when I was studying with him in the 1970s. I am reconstructing it for you as I remember it and in the way I use it in my work. Because I mention it here in a section on Plato’s Symposium, it evidently consists of some aspects of the love relationship.
The basic idea is as follows. An electric current exist only if there is a difference of potential between two poles of opposite charges (+ and -). If the two poles have an identical charge, no current exists between them. If the two poles are too strongly opposed, an explosion can possible destroy them both and consequently cancel the difference of potential that created the energy. If two individuals fall madly in love with each other, something very powerful has happened between them. Something facilitated the emergence of this love. In the case of love at first sight, two people fall in love with each other without really knowing each other. From what they were at this moment, love emerged.
This model is particularly relevant with regard to enmeshed couples,45 where each one would like it if there were no conflicts, no disagreements, and no disillusions. They both try to change each other to render their relationship increasingly harmonious. One of the problems with such a couple is that the more they manipulate each other, the less they look like who they were when they fell in love. They progressively move away from who they really are to obtain a relationship that they imagine to be harmonious. The difference in the potential energy of their original identity lessens as they fashion themselves to look more alike, as they develop a common ideology and affect and begin to become a caricature of each other. The first evidence of this leveling of differences is often the loss of sexual activity. The moral of this story is that to want to blend water and soil is to transform a region into an ocean of mud. To create harmony between water and fire is a difficult art, according to Eryximachus, because it requires the creation of an entity that maintains the nature of both water and fire. Such a harmonious accord can only exist if the identity of each remains intact. This is what an enmeshed couple who consults with me has to learn if they want to extract themselves from the muddy emotional, aesthetic, and identity crisis in which they are drowning.
RELAXATION AS A HAVEN
In the course of my training, I learned a great many massage, meditation, and relaxation techniques that intend to create a sense of inner harmony. I have myself been able to appreciate the restorative pleasure that these states can bring about. They often relate to a sense of profound psychophysiological relaxation, like being cleansed from the inside, like being at peace with oneself and with what surrounds us, and finally offer a powerful impression of inner unity. When I practice one of these exercises, I am like a ship’s pilot navigating out of life’s storms and finding a quiet port where I can rest and regain strength. I try to help my patients discover such havens in the course of therapy; not only because such peaceful moments are pleasant but also because they have a powerful healing effect on the soul’s wounds, and they sometimes foster the rediscovery of the will to live, and to feel anew, from within, the flowing vigor of life.
For most people, a port is a stopover and not a goal. It is a place to load and unload merchandise. These states of inner harmony nurse consciousness and calm psychological turbulence, but they are not states that satisfactorily support the confrontation of life’s complexities. People who would like to spend their life in such a state protect themselves not only from anxiety but also from all of the creative impulses that promote their existence.46
In general, a psychotherapist chooses a type of psychotherapy with which his conscious and nonconscious potential finds resonance and that may have a beneficial effect on most of his patients. This criterion is not one of truth but of convenience. Some work well when they seek a harmony between the elements presented, as Eryximachus suggests; others are more effective when they support the tensions that keep an organism alive, according to Heraclitus. Some patients sometimes have the need of one style of therapy more than another; for others, in other situations, this distinction is irrelevant.
This type of dialectical way of thinking had already been developed in China and in Japan, for example, by acupuncturists. My teacher of Chinese massage during the 1980s, Hiroshi Nozaki, taught us the theory of the elements used in Japanese medicine. He gave us the following example:
Vignette on metal in acupuncture. If you place metal between water and fire, the antagonism between the two elements can be mastered usefully. The metal permits the regulation of the tension that naturally exists between fire and water. Through the mastery of this possibility, humans have been able to develop, for example, the culinary arts or the steam engine.
For Hiroshi Nozaki, a medicine like metal does not harmonize fire and water but creates new constructive possibilities between elements that remain antagonists.
Now I want to prophesy to those who convicted me, for I am at the point when men prophesy most, when they are about to die. I say gentlemen, to those who voted to kill me, that vengeance will come upon you immediately after my death, a vengeance much harder to bear than that which you took in killing me. You did this in the belief that you would avoid giving an account of your life, but I maintain that quite the opposite will happen to you. There will be people to test you, whom I now held back, but you did not notice it. They will be more difficult to deal with as they will be younger and you will resent them more. (Plato, 1997, Apology, III.39c, p. 421)
In the preceding chapters, I have described Idealistic propositions that are often considered good reasons to become an Idealist. I now discuss some implications of this stance that may explain the violent reactions that Idealism has aroused. I limit myself in situating those implications in the life of Plato; in speaking of Wilhelm Reich, we will see that these implications are always present.
Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. (Rainer-Marie Rilke, 1908, Letters to a Young Poet, IV, p. 361)
Idealism has never been a pure speculation. It opens almost automatically on a global and militant vision. Those who have the impression of having entered into contact with the Truth often think that they are authorized to make pronouncements on everything that goes on in the world. They assume that their deep intuition about what is Just and False gives them permission to judge everything.
But when the souls we call immortal reach the top, they move outward and take their stand on the high ridge of heaven, where its circular motion carries them around as they stand while they gaze upon what is outside heaven. (Plato, 1997, Phaedrus, 247–248, p. 525)
They have the impression that their wisdom guarantees the relevance of their delusions and their thirst for power. In their way of thinking, their judgment necessarily trumps the examination of those who have not learned to integrate the Truths of the soul into their consciousness.
Let us take the case of an Idealist chemist who discovers a new and important fact in the course of his research. He becomes convinced that his capacity to find a scientific truth is a sign that he also has access to global Truth. This position is coherent with the supposition that there exist but one Truth. He then believes that he knows more about politics than the politician or more about morality than the moralist. It is thus that a school that extolls an Idealist theory often does not limit the propagation of its teaching to the expertise it acquired. It will use its reputation for a particular expertise as a platform to diffuse a much larger understanding. Students that come to such a school to acquire a professional competence will be submitted to requirements relative to what they think about beauty, love, justice, and so on.
A curious but frequent aspect of this way of thinking that I cannot explain to my satisfaction is that it often leads to a form of sexual militancy: a militant homosexuality with Plato;47 chastity with some Christians, or at least an absolute separation of sexual pleasure and the necessity to procreate; and the insistence on heterosexual orgasm with Reich. In all of these theories, sexuality is part of the world of Ideas or can give access to it. A wrong use of sexuality leads necessarily to an impoverished contact with the Ideas, God, or Nature. There are many ethical problems in this contagion from one truth to another:
If I am right when I assume that Idealism describes a functioning of consciousness, the following developments can be useful to clinicians who treat a patient in whom Idealism has become omnipresent. A psychotherapist who is unaware of this can find it difficult to come face to face with a series of mental mechanisms that exist in his own mind. The student or the patient who faces an authority that believes it rises above any limits often does not have a sufficient education to defend himself against this type of intrusion. Such a person will often adhere to what is presented or will drown in a revolt against something he does not understand.
Socrates, whose piety, continence and obedience to the laws has no equal, is presented to us at the same time as one who criticizes the rules instituted by the State, who insults the governing class and ridicules them in public. (Roustang, 2009, Le secret de Socrate pour changer la vie, 9, p. 173; translated by Marcel Duclos)
Over the centuries, the myth of Socrates has been the myth of the Christ of the philosophers who died for having tried to improve the way other citizens think by asking disturbing questions. Having had enough of being continuingly brought up short, they wanted to assassinate the very one who showed them how lazy they were in their thinking. According to Plato, Socrates’s worst enemies were the sophists, those who know how to make convincing arguments in favor of any opinion to influence those who cast votes within a democracy. Only since the postmodern philosophers do we attend to a criticism of this myth and a rehabilitation of the sophists in relationship to the media. Indeed, improving how minorities present their opinions is an important element of the dynamics of a democracy, even if this function eventually favors the most powerful movements. The problem for the Idealists is that the media publicize points of view that are distant from all manner of Truths.
In continuing this reflection, I propose an ethical analysis of what I understand to be the notion of a master and of a school, basing myself on what was at stake at Socrates’s trial. This discussion seems pertinent to me to support the students of Idealistic schools of psychotherapy. They can therefore profit from the knowledge of an often useful Idealistic instruction and protect themselves from the disrespect that these teaching often have toward the free will of others.
To understand the trial of Socrates, it is useful to situate it in its political context. Half a century earlier, Athens was a powerful republic in which every adult male citizen had the right to vote. Women and the numerous slaves in the city did not have the same right. Athens had become powerful in creating an empire that the city governed in a tyrannical manner. It is nonetheless the custom to consider Athens the first republic and the first attempt to create a democratic government.
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR (CA. 431–404 BC)
The golden age of Athens occurred while the city was governed by Pericles. The republic was extremely rich, and it attracted a number of particularly important artists and brilliant thinkers. The beginning of its decadence also occurred during this epoch. The royal city of Sparta and her allies decided to support the revolt of those kingdoms previously conquered by Athens. This unleashed the interminable Peloponnesian War that ended with victory for Sparta. The royalists created a government composed of thirty members of the old Athenian aristocracy. This government of “thirty oligarchs” persecuted the republicans. Greatly unpopular, they were toppled within a few months by the republicans, who then persecuted those who had supported the oligarchy. Socrates’s trial is one of the last and most well-known reprisals carried out by the citizens of Athens.
SOCRATES, PLATO, AND THE OLIGARCHS
Plato’s parents were from some illustrious Athenian families. Certain branches of the family were close to the oligarchs, and other branches had supported Pericles. Pericles and Plato’s father had died not long after Plato’s birth.
In The Symposium, Plato shows us Socrates about to carry out a philosophical discussion with Athenian personalities close to the oligarchs, especially Alcibiades. This dignitary had been a brilliant Athenian politician. Having led the Athenian army in a disastrous campaign, he had gone over to the enemy and given the Spartans precious information that helped them capture the port of Athens. This dialogue, redacted after Socrates’s trial, demonstrates that Socrates and Plato were members of an “intelligentsia” relatively indifferent to the interests of the republic.
Socrates was, at that time, the head of a renowned school that educated the golden youth of Athens. Among the students were many sons of families who had close ties to the oligarchy. The school had a questionable reputation because it seemed to be, in the eyes of some (like Aristophanes), what we would today call a sect: “It is a Thinkery for intellectual souls. That’s where people live who try to prove that the sky is like a baking-pot all round us, and we’re the charcoal inside it. And if you pay them well, they can teach you how to win a case whether you’re right or not”48 (Aristophanes, 2002, The Clouds, p. 78).
The Socrates of Plato’s first dialogues can sometimes be perceived as a master who exercises a kind of gentle but insidious hammering that finally leaves the other confused and without a voice. Even today, one finds authors for whom Plato’s early dialogues show a Socrates “backed up by yes-men and opposed by the philosophically naïve who are doomed to confusion” (Gaskin, 1993, p. xxiii).
ENLIGHTENED TYRANNY
The students of Socrates came from the milieu of the grand families who were often not at ease with the democratic management of Athens. This antidemocratic sentiment was exacerbated when the republic of Athens was drawn into the Peloponnesian War: a war it mismanaged with disastrous results. Alcibiades was not the only one of Socrates’s students to go over to the enemy. Xenophanes, who wrote several works in the defense of Socrates, was also one of them.
When the republicans regained power, Socrates and his friends publicly advocated an enlightened tyranny. For them, the only thing wrong with the oligarchy was that it was formed by incompetent people selected by Sparta. An oligarchy of philosophers and experts would have governed better than a republic.
After the death of Socrates, Plato details, in The Republic, a political proposition that still influences various forms of totalitarian power. His first argument against democratic regimes is that a citizen rarely has the expertise to evaluate the implications at stake in a vote.49 Only a philosopher—that is to say, only a person in contact with the Ideas contained in his soul—has the capacity to know what has to be undertaken for the common good. The philosopher may have to lie, rig the votes, and manipulate the opinions of the citizens, if he does so to defend a position necessary for the survival of the city. In other words, he is the expert who decides what others ought to know, think, and do. This discussion also takes place in the therapeutic milieus of the twenty-first century. An Idealist therapist believes that he is in a position to decide what a patient has the right to know concerning his own health. The actual position, clearly in opposition to Idealistic propositions, is that the patient always has the right to know what one knows about him. Yet the Idealist stance is still employed in all of the world’s democracies,50 if only in their way of carrying out secret services. Some people sometimes relate the government of the European common market to a platonic oligarchy of experts instead of a democracy such as it is defined and practiced in countries such as Switzerland.
Plato touches on practices that are even more difficult to accept when, always for the good of the state, he proposes eugenics procedures. He would like the government to make it such that the most gifted would mate with each other and that individuals who are gifted for particular professions would marry each other:51
The offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.
Yes, he said, that must be done if the breed of the guardians is to be kept pure. (Plato, 1937, The Republic, V 460c, p. 722)
While waiting for the development of philosophers able to govern in an oligarchy, united by the one and only Truth, Plato and Aristotle tried to promote enlightened tyrants.
MORALITY
The force of Idealism is to give hope that humanity will be able to discover not only how to govern the world but also how to establish a morality. For Plato, it is not possible to vote, even in a democracy, on what is Advantageous, Beautiful, Good, Just, and True, because these Ideas are defined in a dimension other than the one in which humans think. Scientific truth demands more than a vote among the scholars, because it depends on systems of validation produced by an experimental method that only the experts know how to apply. In such a system, the individual spontaneously grants himself the right to be beyond social directives as soon as a rule is defined in an interpersonal dimension. At the end of World War II, it became evident that following the laws instituted by the Nazis and the Communists were incompatible with moral behavior. An individual saw fit to protect Jewish refugees who were pursued by the state. In France, although the government had signed a peace treaty with the invading Germans, many people decided, in the name of an individual and interpersonal (religious, existentialist, humanistic, etc.) conviction to form pockets of resistance against the invader. For these people, it was moral to disobey the law. The difficulty in such a situation is to determine what is moral and who decides what is moral.
The seductive side of the Idealist analysis of moral responsibility is that it allows one to foresee the possibility of explaining a pertinent morality for everybody; that is, as soon as we designate an instance capable of “translating” what is inscribed in the transpersonal dimension. Once we accept this act of faith, it becomes possible to be convinced that we are able to discern good from evil. This approach remains, in the final analysis, the only one that the conscious mind of individual humans can assume. It is difficult to solicit the responsibility of citizens without having the impression that each one can have a sense of responsibility, an intuition about what is just.
AN EXTREME HOMOSEXUAL MILITANCY
Those who are inspired by this love turn to the male, and delight in him who is the more valiant and intelligent nature; any one may recognize the pure enthusiasts in the very character of their attachments. For they love not boys, but intelligent beings whose reason is beginning to be developed, much about the time at which their beards begin to grow. (Plato, 1937, The Symposium, 181c-d, p. 309)
But when it [the soul of an initiate] looks upon the beauty of the boy and takes the stream of particles flowing into it from his beauty (that is what is called “desire”), when it is watered and warmed by this, then all its pain subsides and is replaced by joy52 (Plato, 1997, Phaedrus, 251c-d, p. 528f)
In The Symposium, it is not only a milieu close to the oligarchs that is described, but also a milieu in which homosexuality is considered the only way love can become so intense and profound that it can allow one to enter into contact with the world of Ideas. There is no platonic love unless two united bodies permit two souls to love each other.53 Men are the only persons capable of enough maturity to love this way. “The love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel and is apt to be of woman as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul” (Plato, 1937, The Symposium, 181 a-b, p. 309).
In this milieu, homosexuality was only part-time, as even Socrates was married. He had also had as a teacher a woman named Aspasia. She was no ordinary woman: she was a foreigner and a courtesan. Exceptionally beautiful and intelligent, she initiated Socrates to the pleasures of the soul by introducing him to sexuality.54 Plato also admitted that a relatively strong love could exist between women and men, like Alcestis who accepted dying in the place of her husband.55 There are two texts on The Symposium: one by Plato and one by Xenophon. Both agree that (1) Socrates did not make love with his students, and (2) homosexual eroticism did play a role in his pedagogical strategy. He used the eroticism that could exist in his relationship with his students to help them sense the Truth and Beauty that surpasses what the majority of citizens could experience. In Phaedrus, an aging Plato dares to describe, in one of his most beautiful texts, the orgasmic pleasure of an adolescent who loses his virginity to a philosopher. This ecstasy is depicted as a moment of extreme intensity during which the adolescent is initiated not only to Love but also to Poetry, to the most absolute Beauty, and to the Truth that he holds in the depths of his being.56
These texts are often presented as hardly reprehensible, to the extent that homosexuality would have been common in ancient Greece,57 and the age of marriage was then that of puberty. Such arguments are only partially relevant. It suffices to read Homer to see the importance of heterosexual relations in Greece, as is evident in the rapport of Hector and Ulysses with their wives. Nicole Loraux58 shows that the Athenians at the time of The Symposium spoke mostly of the virility of the warrior. Warriors were becoming rare, because many died at war. The homosexual militancy of Socrates’s school far surpasses the homosexuality such as it was lived habitually in Greece. Later we discuss Reich, who develops similar arguments when he speaks of heterosexual orgasm. Reich’s idealized heterosexuality was as far removed from the heterosexual practices of his time as the homosexuality of Plato was from the homosexual practices of his epoch.
Sometime around 399 BC, Socrates was accused of “corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods to whom the City believes and to be substituting new divinities” (Plato, 1937, Apology of Socrates, 24b, p. 407). The trial judges had functions similar to those of judges in contemporary courts of law in Europe; the jury was composed of all of the citizens of Athens who were asked to vote on the verdict and the sentence.59 The trial unfolded in two phases:
Phase I. Decide whether Socrates was innocent or guilty.
Phase II. Decide the punishment.
This distinction is also relevant when I shall discuss the trial of Wilhelm Reich.
IS SOCRATES GUILTY?
We now know enough to understand that Socrates’s behavior corresponded to the wording of the accusation.
The impression that Socrates represented a danger to the republic by being an activist in political movements that threatened its existence was well founded. Aristotle, Plato’s student, became the tutor of the boy who became Alexander the Great. As a symbol of enlightened tyranny (and probably homosexual), Alexander represents Plato’s hopes and dreams. He destroyed the republic of Athens and subjugated Greece before conquering the Asia of his time.
Having arrived at the end of the first phase of the trial, the majority of the citizens thought Socrates guilty as charged; however, they waited for him to present his defense before deciding on his punishment. None of them were thinking of condemning him to death.
HOW TO CONDEMN SOCRATES?
The death sentence is suggested and promoted by Socrates. He accuses his fellow citizens of incompetence and stupidity. He absolves himself of any and all error. Only the gods have the competence to judge a man as righteous as he. Socrates is now seventy years old; he deems himself ill-equipped to suffer the disapproval of his co-citizens or even a gilded exile.
In the discussions he has with his students while in prison awaiting the day of his execution, Socrates speaks to them of the grief and sorrow he feels having been condemned for a life that he totally claims as his own—he had wanted it to be as close to his personal convictions as possible. For him and for those who admire him, this condemnation is also a condemnation of all attempts to develop and publicly display personal convictions. For this, Socrates is often held up as the martyr of free thinkers.
It is for his disdain of the court, and not for what he did, that his Athenian co-citizens condemned Socrates to death, obliging him to drink poisonous hemlock. We will find the same chain of events when we speak of Reich’s trial. He was condemned to prison for contempt of court, not because of his treatments based on his orgone theory, judged as quackery or a delusion.
In his works, Plato presents Socrates to us as the greatest of all teachers; in his institutional work, he also tells us that Socrates is not an example to emulate. It is only in contrasting Plato’s institutional work with his writings that his salient originality and his importance can be fully appreciated.
Even though Plato spent his life defending Socrates’s reputation, he founded in 387 BC the antidote to the omnipotence of the great masters by creating an Academy (the name of the gardens that surround a building). The structure of the Academy indicates that from the time of the judgment on the fate of Socrates, Plato had intensely questioned his former beliefs. It contains a library, lecture halls, and rooms for particularly gifted students.60 This Academy gathers authorities in many disciplines to establish an education that cannot be associated with one sect or one school of thought. In this way, students can learn from masters who represent different approaches. Nothing will stop them from specializing after having followed different ways of thinking. This Academy is recognized as the foundation of the academic institutions (wherein lies the etymological link).
Socrates’s teaching addressed itself to the elite students who frequented his school. To discover the Ideas in a school like his, engaging in intense reflection is a luxury that very few people could afford. Plato and then Aristotle proceeded from the conviction that we all have the same truths within us. They can be made explicit, together or individually. A public knowledge could thus complement the unavoidable self-exploration every citizen must undertake.
The Academy founded science, to the extent that it initiated a collective search for the truth. Aristotle was a student and then a teaching member of this institution. We attribute to him the foundation of the scientific movement. Science is then conceived as coordination between rigorous observations and reflections undertaken collectively to be able to enter into resonance with the intuitions of the soul. Therein lies the potential to foresee the possibility of creating a kind of human knowledge able to bring about the true functioning of the world and the way humans should participate in the future of this world. The scientific movement has the task of producing irrefutable truths, close to the visions inspired by the Truth of the world of Ideas.
The different psychotherapies constitute a domain that has not yet developed enough to be considered academic. The question here is not to know up to what point the formulations produced by psychotherapists are “scientific” but up to what point they are produced by an ethics of knowledge compatible with science. This implies the capacity to leave behind the structure of particular schools, masters, and teachings that constitute themselves in a conceptual frame that is limited to a specific endeavor. The inability of the schools of psychotherapy to produce concepts and terms common to the whole of their discipline and debates on the different ways to understand these common notions keep them in an intellectual status that predates Plato.