I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the notion of goodness, truth and beauty as I’ve been reading The Republic. The Catholic tradition recognises these as “transcendentals”; I’m not Catholic (although my grandma went to a convent school and has lots of interesting stories about her time there!), but I think there is much value in this idea and I wanted to explore it a bit in this post.
Plato presents the idea that only those who have an understanding of the Good are fit to be rulers of the kallipolis. In his Allegory of the Cave, he describes how some people are able to leave the cave and see the truth. He also advocates that children should be exposed only to beautiful art, literature and music – he believes that anything that falls short of this standard is actually a corrupting influence on impressionable young minds.
The Allegory of the Cave describes how a group of people have been living their lives tied up in a dark cave, facing a blank wall. There is a wall of fire behind them, and hiding behind the fire are more people who wave statues of objects in the air as if they were conducting a puppet show. The fire causes the silhouettes of these statues to be displayed on the wall which the tied-up people are facing. These tied-up people have no idea that the statue-wielding people are there, so they believe that the silhouettes they see on the wall are actually real things, as they are all they can see. Naturally, it doesn’t occur to them that these are just the shadows of statues of things, not even close to the actual objects themselves.
One of the men tied up manages to rid himself of the chains which tie him into the cave, and, turning around, he sees the fire and the statues being waved around. Eventually he accepts that the things he thought were real all his life were just shadows, and now he believes the statues to be the true objects. After he finds a way out of the cave, he realises that even then he was wrong, because these were just statues of things, not the things themselves. And finally, he looks up to the sky and sees the Sun (which here represents the Form of the Good). He realises that it is only because of the light the Sun provides that he can see things as they truly are.
The man goes back into the cave to persuade the others to come out with him, and experience reality as it really is. But they refuse to believe his stories of the outside world. Socrates even suggests that they might try and kill the man if he tried to move them by force, so desperately do they want to stay in the familiar world of the cave.
Plato talks about instilling virtue in a person through education. He claims that the highest purpose of education should be to create adults who firstly are capable of understanding the good, but moreover, who want to understand it: people who continually try to improve themselves, who cannot help but pursue truth and the good and gravitate toward beauty.
Plato has been criticised for his seemingly authoritarian leanings in wanting to ban certain books for children, but I don’t think that he meant censorship as it is recognised today. Rather, he was simply suggesting that adults should be selective with what they expose their children to, which I don’t suppose anyone will actually disagree with. The things that Plato advocates exposing children to are things that are beautiful and wholesome. It’s all very well to wonder who Plato thinks he is to decide which things are beautiful and wholesome, but I don’t think he is suggesting that this is his preferred curriculum and that we should make it mandatory – rather, he believes that anyone with understanding of the Good will agree on what is beautiful, because beauty, like truth and goodness, is completely objective, so Plato doesn’t see that there’s any dispute to be had. If someone suggests a book or piece of music to show to children, there is, as Plato sees it, a right or wrong answer as to whether it is beautiful or not. It isn’t about taste or suppressing other people’s opinions in favour of Plato’s. It is simply that everyone will agree on what is objectively good or objectively bad, and will only want to present their children with what is good.
To return to the Allegory of the Cave, there are many in the cave who don’t consider trying to escape, who don’t want to know what is over their shoulder that they can’t see. Perhaps many societal problems today are the result of a kind of neglect of the soul, in childhood as well as throughout people’s lives. The virtuous soul which Plato wants to cultivate – in the formative years while souls are still malleable – cannot help but seek truth, goodness and beauty. Virtue could almost be measured by the extent to which an individual attempts to break free of their bonds, turn from the wall of shadows and seek knowledge of the Good.
What is the purpose of education? I agree with Plato that education should cultivate virtue in the individual – the wisdom to discern what is good, true or beautiful and the desire to seek it. Wisdom cannot be measured in As and A*s; anyone can learn content for an exam, and many highly “educated” people have proven to lack a moral compass or indeed the courage of their convictions. With this in mind, I want to try to elucidate my thoughts on the Transcendentals, and how I am trying to approach my own education.
The idea that there is no such thing as objective truth leads to absurdity. I am so convinced of this and have such a strong belief that this is true, and yet I have not read all the philosophy and logic and epistemological arguments to the contrary. I cannot prove it; although maybe I shall be able to in the future – and a demand for objective proof itself assumes such a thing exists, surely. So I merely assert that some things are true, and some are not, and that truth is binding and binary. For all their distortions and contortions, opponents of this view cannot function in the world. They necessarily assume that objective facts exist in their every action and interaction with their surroundings. They can sit around in their offices and postulate that even maths can be subjective, but they would be the first to object if their salary was a decimal point in the wrong direction.
Similarly, I wholeheartedly disagree with the increasingly trendy belief in moral relativism. Just because there are tricky questions where it is difficult to come to the right answer, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a right answer. I think that what Plato is getting at when he talks about achieving knowledge of the Good is that, once you have genuinely seen and understood the Good, you can’t unsee it. The man who breaks free from the cave and sees the Sun shining on the real objects, cannot take himself back into the cave and look at the shadows on the wall and believe them to be true again – it simply doesn’t make sense. And if you understand the Good, it permeates every fibre of your being; it makes no sense to act in opposition to it. People brought up on a diet of moral relativism not only cannot ever hope to understand the Good, they don’t even acknowledge the possibility of its existence, and so can’t begin to seek it.
And where does beauty fit in to all of this? Once we accept that truth and goodness are objective, we can agree that what is beautiful is not necessarily simply a matter of opinion. We can state with confidence that Bach is better than Bieber! Bach’s music is intrinsically good and objectively beautiful. If Palestrina isn’t immediately gratifying, perhaps I need to learn and grow and gain more wisdom in order to appreciate it. Can it really be doubted that Renaissance architecture is objectively better than the depressing concrete streets of the Soviet Union? To take a walk in beautiful autumnal nature, to marvel at the complexities of biology and physics, hear the sad beauty of Albinoni’s Adagio or a simple saxophone song played by a lonely busker on a busy city night – we are surrounded by beauty, we cannot help but gravitate towards it. We ought to strive to recognise it, to preserve it, and to create it. What is beautiful is good, and what is good must be true, and what is true is necessarily beautiful. The three are intertwined and inseparable.
All this has made me want to consider more deeply how I approach life, and how I can improve that approach. There are certain habits that I want to maintain, and others that I want to establish: I want to keep getting up early in the morning, exercising and eating healthily; journalling and blogging; I want to start appreciating music more, particularly classical music, and I want to learn how to play the most beautiful pieces on the piano; I want to watch more documentaries and listen to more podcasts that will broaden my knowledge and interests; read more books, and try desperately to understand them; to write my own stories with goodness and truth in mind; and ultimately, I want to try harder to appreciate the beauty of things I don’t understand, instead of being dismissive of them, and to have the courage to go against the crowd and stand up for what I believe is right.
Fundamentally, I think this amounts to trying to approach life from a position of good faith – to give the benefit of the doubt as far as possible, to be humble and openminded. If something seems at odds with how you immediately feel about it, the best way forward is to try and understand what was meant, rather than arrogantly and presumptuously dismiss it. Similarly, the purpose of studying literature or music or art is not to decide whether you liked it or not – we should not choose things because they are easy or likeable. If you don’t immediately like something you should perhaps spend more time trying to appreciate and understand it, not put it down as “bad” just because you didn’t get it right away. Rather, I will try to consider what I can take away and incorporate into my general picture of the world.
I can’t promise that I will never again choose Hannibal Lecter over Herodotus, or chomp through an entire packet of biscuits while bingeing three seasons of The X-Files. But I will always try and do better next time, perhaps with the question in my mind, “What would Socrates do?”