IDRlabs

Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine and Jung’s Typology, Part 2

admin

By Ryan Smith

“Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing.” – Plato: Seventh Letter §344c

When we last left the question of Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine, we had seen that Plato had been confronted with the Third Man Argument during the late part of his career. We had also seen that a group of modern scholars (known as Unitarians) tend to think that Plato was unperturbed by this argument, while another group of scholars (known as Revisionists) tend to think that Plato underwent an intellectual crisis that caused him to abandon the Theory of Forms altogether.

However, in our previous installment we also sketched out why neither the Unitarian nor the Revisionist standpoint is entirely able to account for the facts. Against the Revisionist position counts the fact that there is no actual evidence that Plato abandoned his Theory of Forms. But against the Unitarian theory counts the fact that we know from Plato’s own writings (such as Parmenides §135a) as well as from other testimonies (such as Aristotle’s Metaphysics §1086a-1090a) that the Theory of Forms was under attack during this period. Furthermore, we can also see for ourselves that Plato’s late writings list pertinent arguments against the Theory of Forms and that they seemingly fail to defend the Forms with the same vehemence as Plato’s earlier writings.

So neither the Unitarian nor the Revisionist standpoint checks out upon closer inspection. Plato did not abandon the Theory of Forms, but nor was he unperturbed by the emergence of the Third Man Argument and the corrosive effect it had upon support for the Forms. That means that something else must have happened during the late part of Plato career.

The Late Period

On review of the evidence, I find that the Unwritten Doctrine was developed during Plato’s late period. The reasons for its inception were probably manifold, but one purpose of the Unwritten Doctrine seems to have been to incorporate Plato’s growing knowledge of Pre-Socratic philosophy into his main theory of the Forms. Another end was to defend the Theory of Forms against intellectual attacks like the Third Man Argument.

As we shall see, the introduction of the Unwritten Doctrine extends the Theory of Forms quite dramatically. If Plato’s original Theory of Forms was like living in a house, he neither kept living in that house (as the Unitarians say) but nor did he abandon the house (like the Revisionists say). Rather, he added several new stories to the house and then lived in the new modified house for the rest of his life.

Here’s how he went about it.

The Unwritten Doctrine

Trying to reconstruct the contents of the Unwritten Doctrine may seem like an excessively speculative endeavor. But though we are fumbling in the dark we are not completely without a light to guide us: We have several reports from listeners describing what the content of the Unwritten Doctrine was like.

Now as mentioned, there seems to have been at least two pertinent reasons for Plato to develop his Unwritten Doctrine:

One was for Plato to make sense of his increased acquaintance with Pre-Socratic philosophy by integrating the thoughts of previous thinkers into his own system. Of these earlier Greek thinkers, it was particularly the insights of Heraclitus and Parmenides that Plato wanted to appropriate to his own system. This can be inferred through the existence of Platonic works such as the Cratylus, and the Parmenides, which explore the ideas of Heraclitus and Parmenides in relation to Plato’s Theory of Forms.

The other reason that Plato developed his Unwritten Doctrine was that he wanted to defend the Theory of Forms from the Third Man Argument, which we described in Part 1 of this essay. (The Third Man Argument basically ran like this: “If the Forms cause our physical existence, then what causes the Forms? More Forms? That would seem kind of silly.”)

The following reconstruction of Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine accounts for both of these concerns.

Outline of the Unwritten Doctrine

The resulting cosmology then looks like this:

So as you can see, the Forms now go from being the ultimate entities to being merely the intermediate entities of the cosmos. However, these bullet points are only an outline.

Plato and the Pythagoreans

Throughout antiquity there was a persistent debate regarding the influence of Pythagorean ideas on Plato’s system of thought. Many people (including Aristotle and Cicero) thought that Plato was strongly influenced by Pythagoras, and some even thought that Plato was a secret Pythagorean with no original doctrine of his own![3]

The precise contents of Pythagorean doctrine are debatable. But it is clear that Pythagoreans believed in number mysticism, and that they had a primitive table of opposites which they used for the basis of their cosmology (opposites such as “male / female”, “light / dark”, “good / evil” and so on). The Pythagoreans believed that reality is caused by the interactions between numbers and opposites, with the numbers playing an instrumental role in the generation of phenomena that can be likened to a primitive version of Plato’s Forms.

From the evidence available to us I suggest that Plato appropriated the Pythagorean table of opposites to fit with his own system.[4] In doing so he identified the following qualities with the One and the Duality, respectively:

THE ONE
Stillness; being; unity; larger than the Duality; stronger than the Duality; limited; father; rational; good; order; judging.

THE INDEFINITE DUALITY
Flux; becoming; multiplicity; smaller than the One; weaker than the One; unlimited; mother; irrational; evil; chaos; perceiving.

It will be seen, then, that Forms and numbers (and pure mathematics) are the children of father and mother while the sensible world is the result of interaction between mother and child without the direct involvement of father who stands aloof from the illusory world of the senses. The cosmology of the Unwritten Doctrine thus ties quite neatly into Plato’s personal psychology: To the world-denying Plato, the sensible world seemed mostly evil, imperfect, irrational, and impure, so it makes sense that the highest principle of existence – the One that is wholly good, rational, and pure – plays no active part in the sensible world.

The Interrelation between the One and the Duality

To Plato, the One exists because it must: It is perfect and complete, lacking nothing. (Parmenides: On Nature §8.) Like Thomas Aquinas’ God, if the One did not exist, it would lack something, namely Being. So to Plato, it is logically imperative that the One must exist. But the Duality only exists because it is necessary for it to do so. This distinction requires some further remarks.

As just mentioned, we can rationally infer that the One must exist.  However, as the One is wholly rational and good, never moves, and isn’t subject to any conditions, it follows that since there is evil, chaos, and irrationality in the world, these negative qualities must have originated from another entity, which according to Plato must be the Indefinite Duality.[5]

If there were only the One then there would be solely one finite thing and no movement, nor any generation or decay in the world. But if there were only the Duality, the world would be infinite chaos with no principles of order or form to constrain it and no two objects would be anything alike (for example, there would be no regularities like species – each animal would be completely unique and not akin to any other).

Paternal reason thus persuades maternal necessity and sets limits for her so far as he is able. But due to the unlimited and infinitely chaotic nature of the Duality, there will always be a residual indefiniteness in the world that escapes the rationalizing influence of the One. Therefore, though the father is stronger than the mother, he can never completely overtake her.

The Duality is responsible for all generation and decay in the world. All arising and ceasing can therefore be grouped together under a fluid ‘Becoming’ that causes the sensible world to emerge in all its imperfection. This fluid Becoming can then be contrasted with the static ‘Being’ of the One, which shows us again how the mother’s ‘Becoming’ is but an imperfect and deficient imitation of father’s perfect Being.

In other words, the One exists because it is rational and good for it to do so, but the Duality only exists because it is necessary for it to do so.

How the Unwritten Doctrine Solved the Problems It was Meant to Solve

Both Heraclitus and Parmenides had postulated entities that seemed more sublime than Plato’s Forms and which Plato did not know how to handle. By developing his Unwritten Doctrine, Plato integrated each of their entities into his own system. The principles of Heraclitus and Parmenides may indeed have been higher than the Forms, but the way Plato saw it they were also both too one-sided to account for both practical reality and the highest principles of existence at the same time.

Without Plato’s synthesis of the Parmenidian One and the Heraclitian Flux into his own “ladder of Being” each would be unable to account for the cardinal principle of the other. Parmenides would be unable to account for movement and Heraclitus would be unable to account for rest. Only by their synthesis can the two be brought to make sense of each other and the world. (Here Plato resembles Jung, who wrote Psychological Types in order to “find his own bearing” by synthesizing, amongst other things, the teachings of Adler and Freud.)[6]

As for the Third Man Argument, until he developed his Unwritten Doctrine, Plato had been unable to answer the question “what causes the Forms?” without having to fall back on the awkward proposition of “more Forms.” After the inception of the Unwritten Doctrine, he could now point to the One and the Indefinite Duality as the ultimate principles of existence and also as the causes of the Forms. Whether this argument actually refutes the Third Man Argument or not will be discussed in further detail below. For now it is enough to note that Plato was satisfied enough with it to think that it did.

Conclusion

The contents of the Unwritten Doctrine have now been reconstructed, but we are still left with the following questions:

These are the questions that we will answer when we come back.

***

Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine and Jung’s Typology © Ryan Smith and CelebrityTypes International 2014.

Images in the article commissioned for this publication from artist Georgios Magkakis.

 NOTES

[1] In my view, however, ascribing a dualistic world view to Heraclitus is to misread him. On my reading, the world view of Heraclitus was just as singular as that of Parmenides. For Heraclitus, the Logos (symbolized by fire) reveals a hidden unity in the world that binds everything together in spite of the obvious and ubiquitous multiplicity that we see before our eyes. Thus Heraclitus says that “the hidden harmony is better than the obvious” (DK B54) and also that “All things are requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods” (DK B90). So what separates Heraclitus and Parmenides is not whether there are one or many principles that govern the world (since they both agree that there is only one principle). What separates them is whether that principle is static Being or protean Becoming. Now it would perhaps be natural to ask whether Plato unintentionally misread Heraclitus or whether he consciously forced a violent appropriation of the Heraclitean teaching to fit the greater scheme of his own Unwritten Doctrine. This, however, is the philosopher’s way of approaching the question. The psychologist would instead note that as Ni is a subjective perception function that functions via the unconscious it is in a sense natural for the Ni psyche to seize upon whatever parts of a prior philosophical thought that is stimulating to the unconscious qua the primordial idea that stands clearly before the inner vision of the Ni type with little regard to notions of objective centrality or original intent. In fact so little regard will often be paid to such notions that the Ni types themselves will be unaware of how they have created something new through their subjective perceptions – the fact that the original thought has undergone a substantial transmutation will as a rule go unrecognized by the Ni type himself. (Jung: Psychological Types §657.) Thus the reason that Plato misappropriated Heraclitus to fit his own system is likely no different from the reason Baruch Spinoza did the same thing with his philosophical predecessors, namely that the benign and fruitful misappropriation of preexisting ideas and concepts is an endemic feature of all Ni.

[2] Numbers are generated when the Duality interacts with the One. This produces the number two, from which the rest of the numbers follow, from interacting with the One and the Duality. The numbers are in themselves ideal and changeless like the Forms. Apparently, there is a special degree of number mysticism imbued in the numbers one through four because they provide the link between the One and the three dimensions of the spatio-temporal world. (Turner: Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition, Les Presses De L’Universite Laval Quebec 2006 ed. p. 316n15.) The theme of the four becoming One, which leads to wholeness, was also of intense and continuous interest to Jung. One palatable consequence of this is the number of functions in Jung’s typology (four) which together form the conception of psychic wholeness (one). This conception of the four in one in itself indicates why it was never Jung’s intention that we should use eight function models, such as proposed by John Beebe and modern internet corruptors of Jungian typology. The whole is the four, united as one. Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation together form the totality of the psyche, and it is through the enantiodromia of Heraclitus (or actually Anaximander, given the way Jung misappropriates Heraclitus [like Plato did before him]) that their orientations towards the inner or outer world are decided. (Bennet: Meetings with Jung Daimon 1985 ed. p. 27.) To Jung, four functions is the whole psyche, not eight, and the modern corruption of this standpoint stems largely from ignorance of the difference between function and orientation, or even outright ignorance of Jung’s writings. The popular support for eight function models has its roots in a process of reverse engineering that is born out of ignorance and failure to acquaint oneself with the basic propositions of the object of study, which is something very different from an informed disagreement with Jung. There are indeed many examples of Jung using the 4-1 scheme throughout his work, and the notion of the four functions forming the whole psyche is but a single instance. Other examples include Jung’s preoccupation with alchemy in which a central axiom runs: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth,” and of course the age-old problem of squaring the circle as well as Jung’s fascination with mandala symbols (the mandala being in fact a square in a circle). In Jungian psychology, the unity of the four and the one is an archetypical symbol of individuation, that is, the individual’s quest for integration and psychic wholeness. At this point it is worth noting that Jung himself was well acquainted with Plato, as well as with medieval alchemists who based their teachings on Platonic (or Neo-platonic) axioms. Thus while the full extent of the connection between Jung and Plato remains undisclosed, there may well be a direct historical link from Plato’s teaching to Jung’s typology and Jung may have had a substantial part of his inspiration for the typology from Platonic sources. (Gieser: The Innermost Kernel Springer 2005 p. 267n823) Furthermore, the Gnostics are frequently credited with inspiring Jung to craft his Sensation types, Thinking types, and Feeling types, with the Intuition function being discovered later on by Mary Moltzer. And as Turner has so brilliantly shown in Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition, the Gnostic tradition drew heavily upon Platonic philosophy. A final remark in this regard is that Plato seems to alternate between a twofold, a threefold, and a fourfold typology, according to whatever suits his needs in the present situation. His most famous typology, however, is the threefold typology from The Republic, which Keirsey has since erroneously misread as a fourfold typology that was akin to Jung’s. In Keirsey’s case, however, we are not dealing with any benign unconscious misappropriation, as was the case with Plato, Jung, and Spinoza. With Keirsey’s appropriation of Plato we are dealing with sheer ignorance and opportunism.

[3] Turner records an interesting twist of fate: After Plato’s death in 347 BCE the philosophical academy which he had founded in Athens carried on its teachings under various successors until in 265 BCE the new head of the academy, Arcesilaus, rejected metaphysical speculation in favor of Pyrrhonian Skepticism. This move was justified as a return to the Socratic method. Around this time the metaphysics of Plato, including his Unwritten Doctrine, was rejected as un-academic, but Plato’s metaphysical teachings still survived outside of the Academy where it was ascribed to Pythagoras instead of Plato. According to Turner, this subterfuge somehow resulted in various writers of the second century CE (such as Sextus Empiricus) calling Plato a plagiarist of Pythagoras. (Turner: Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition, Les Presses De L’Universite Laval Quebec 2006 ed. p. 343.)

[4] The relevant evidence here includes, but is not limited to: Aristotle: Metaphysics §988a and §1091b, as well as Hippolytus’ Refutations §VI.21 and VI.52 and Plato’s own writings such as the Timaeus and the Philebus. We can furthermore know this with some certainty as Aristotle also says in his Physics §209b that “it is true, indeed, that the account [Plato] gives [in the Timaeus] of the participant is different from what he says in his so-called unwritten teachings.” For a more extensive list of sources see Turner: Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition, Les Presses De L’Universite Laval Quebec 2006 ed. p. 315n14.)

[5] A further purpose of the Duality may have been that by virtue of its impure and deficient existence, it elucidates and reinforces the transcendental character of the One as entirely ‘beyond’ ordinary existence.

[6] Jung: C.G. Jung Speaking, Princeton University Press 1977 ed. p. 341, 435.

Exit mobile version