The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. The Basic Concepts of the Platonic Worldview

Highly Esteemed Attendees!

[ 1 ] Eight days ago, I took the liberty of speaking about the Platonic "Phaedo" on the conversation about the immortality - or rather the infinity - of the soul, in order to show how Plato has his hero, let's say Socrates, speak to a kind of initiate, to those of like mind, to souls who can understand him. I said it is a kind of spiritual conversation with those who are already in the matter. And we have seen that it is primarily about leading the participants up to where they actually develop within themselves that of which Goethe says: "And as long as you do not have this, this dying and becoming, you are only a dull guest on the dark earth."

[ 2 ] The conversation ties in with Socrates' death in order to show what Plato thinks of as sensual, how it appears in [his] spiritual retrospection, how Plato understands this retrospection, how he allows [eternity] to peer through it into our temporal existence and how, for him, all things that are given in the world of the senses appear in their true meaning, in their transience and insignificance. "Phaedo" is the most significant of the Platonic dialogues in that it presents the event of death, which is the event that forces man down the most, as an untrue event. It expresses the strongest possible belief in the spiritual world. He says to himself: I believe in the living; and because I believe in the living, I overcome all other things that appear to me in the world of the senses. I also overcome the belief in death, I do not believe in the truth of the appearance of the senses, I believe in the truth of the primordial living.

[ 3 ] The point here is not to provide a logical proof. Through the direct perception of the spiritual, the pupil should awaken the perception of the primordial living, so that death is also only an event of the sense world. Hence this conversation in the face of Socrates' death. The spirit should be in direct harmony with what is shown as a sensual event, so that Socrates simultaneously represents as a spiritual interest what he expresses in the conversation, so that it is expressed as a symbol, so that the dying Socrates in the moment when he approaches sensual death, Socrates, as he approaches sensual death, tries to teach his disciples the belief that death and all that is connected with it is a continual overcoming of sensuality, that life is a continual dying, a coming to terms with everyday life.

[ 4 ] As he brings this teaching to his students, he is also able to seal with death what he has taught. This is how the "Phaidon" stands for us. Even in its external composition it is a symbol of what is inside. Socrates is the bright [guest] who had grasped it, this dying and becoming, and who sought to make it comprehensible to his students in the face of death.

[ 5 ] The other Platonic conversation, the "Banquet", in which [Plato] also has Socrates converse with his friends, appears as a counter-image to this. Here we have the direct opposite. We have Socrates in the presence of the highest affirmation of life, in the midst of carousing people, in the midst of an idea which, like the immortality of the soul in the "Phaedo", is love in the conversation about the "Banquet". This idea is also slowly being grasped again. But the comprehension is such that among the guests [Socrates] alone is the clairvoyant. All those around him have not found it and have not grasped it. They have not grasped it. Socrates rises like a pillar above those who speak out of darkness and error. Among them, Socrates appears to us as the only bright one. It is therefore an addition to the actually clairvoyant conversation of the "Phaidon". Here, in the "Banquet", we are shown how infinitely excellent he is who possesses the highest consecrations of Plato and [how they are represented in Socrates]. Socrates is confronted with the most diverse views. We see how [the guests] personally express their views on love. First Phaidros, a man of ordinary life, who has thought about it from the point of view of common sense. Then Pausanias, a statesman, then a physician, then a poet of the comic type of poetry and then one of the tragic - in short, personalities who have not penetrated into the depths of the mind.

[ 6 ] We can now see how he formed the contrast between the different people. Phaidros said that Eros is the divine, that which is absolutely valuable. Those who are united in love are thereby also compelled to virtuous behavior. He who loves another, who is bound to him in friendship, will feel compelled to behave virtuously in a completely different way. He will feel ashamed if he allows himself to be tempted by an unvirtue. We see [...] that everything practical, the utilitarian point of view, is praised as the originator of virtue.

[ 7 ] The statesman declares that all the order of the state is founded on love and that the state is held together by it.

[ 8 ] We then see how the physician sings the praises of love, how he shows how illness is cured by it, in that the substances that love or do not love each other give direction to the medicine, so that they act according to the deepest laws of the world. It is the disharmony in the universe from which the disease develops. Harmony is what the physician strives for. It is love from which harmony develops. Thus the scholar stands opposite Eros, which permeates everything. I have already spoken about how Empedocles has the world composed of four primary substances and how the primary substances then assume a hostile opposition. What the physicist calls repulsion and attraction, Empedocles calls hate and love.

[ 9 ] [The fourth thing that confronts us]: Aristophanes gives us his view of love in the myth. We have seen that Plato seizes on myth when he wants to ascend to higher powers. Where scientific concepts do not suffice, he resorts to myth, to poetry. It is not something [that should appear as a higher fantasy], but a reflection of higher spiritual events that poetry should be. Aristophanes expresses himself thus: 'Originally human nature was of a very different kind. If we could look back to the origin of the earth, we would see people who are not only divided into individuals, but also those in whom several individuals are united into one. Only later, through a kind of fall into sin, were these individuals separated. They have retained a longing for each other from this original state. This longing is expressed in their love for each other. They seek what they once were and strive towards each other in order to regain their original state, their original nature. For the beloved being, love is nothing other than the striving for their other half, from which they have been separated by the world. - This is the strange worldview in which he expresses his view. He leads them back to what is below what is now human nature. Where the collision of the spiritual and the natural occurs, where they come together in a direct way, the comic confronts us. Every single comic phenomenon consists in nothing other than the succession of the natural, in the [clash] of the natural with the spiritual, without us being able to see the harmonious balance between the two.

[ 10 ] The joke arises from the fact that one seeks to bring about a connection between things that do not belong together, so that the gaping chasm between sensual diversity and spiritual unity always appears. It is this search of the spiritual being for the original natural foundation, this gaping fissure, in which Aristophanes seeks his image for Eros.

[ 11 ] The tragic poet [Agathon] seeks to sing the praises of the god of love in a serious manner. He also makes his views known. He describes the nature of the god of love by saying: "He is that which manifests itself as the fire of the mind, that which winds its way from mind to mind. While longing is a property of reason, love arose when wisdom took possession of the mind. As the human mind feels drawn to the primordial mind of the world, the infinite workings of Eros are revealed. It shows how all human beings are an outflow of the mind, it shows that the highest form of virtue is based in the middle state. It is precisely the love-filled mind that triumphs over blind power everywhere.

[ 12 ] The wisdom of the mind is stronger than the blind force that prevails in the world. [Eros] is stronger than the blindly rushing Ares. These are worldly views that he presents to us. He now contrasts these with the Socratic ones.

[ 13 ] It is Socrates who now makes his views on love known. He is the only bright guest among the dull guests, who rises above the world of the senses and at once enters the vision of the eternal, of ideality. I will show in a moment what a strange appearance Plato allows to occur in relation to Socrates' arguments, and we will see how Plato has given a counter-image to his "Phaidon". We shall see that [Socrates] does not say: I give here a conviction. For all those I have cited are actually stating their opinions. He, as a personality, says Socrates, has no opinion at all. [It has no value at all, is not even worth considering. He immediately puts his personality in the right light. He shows immediately: I am a member of the manifold world. But that which I have elevated myself to should speak from me. That is why he says: I do not give my wisdom - but he points to a seeress, saying that she has initiated him into that which he gives for the best.

[ 14 ] Here you have the passage in Plato's work where you can see what the Greeks meant by this. Wherever a female figure, a priestess, a goddess or heroine or any other female entity enters the spiritual process, a state of consciousness is always meant. We have seen this in the development of the Greek myths and we see it today too. Socrates makes nothing known. He does not want to say anything from the ordinary level of consciousness, but from the higher one. He rises to what the [seeress] Diotima taught him. What does Socrates explain that Diotima taught him? He first explains, in his own way, what love is, and asks: Is it really to be praised as that which has no matter with it at all? Is it really as different as the others have made it out to be? It has been said that Eros is the oldest and most valuable god. But let us only see how he expresses himself. This deity expresses itself by leaning towards something that it does not have itself. We must therefore say that it is based on [lack]. The wise seer taught me something else. She taught me [- says Socrates -] that love, Eros, was conceived at the birth festival of Aphrodite by the god of abundance on the one hand and by the goddess of scarcity, of lack, on the other. Need and wealth are the parents of Eros. We therefore see that where love appears, it is not actually a divine thing, but it is precisely that which stands between the human and the divine. It is that which has not emerged from the pure need of life, but has emerged from the lack of life and from the richness of the eternal as that which forms the mediation that draws man upwards.

[ 15 ] This is how Socrates portrays love. Eros is precisely the mediator that leads from the sensual to the spiritual fullness. Eros is therefore not actually a god, but a mediator between the divine and the human. That is why [Socrates] calls him a "demon". Therefore, this is also an explanation [when otherwise speaking of the demon]. Socrates says that he obeys an inner voice when he should do or refrain from doing something. This demon is nothing other than that which confronts us here as Eros, that which leads us up to the divine. That is why he describes Eros as something demonic, not as something divine. It is the power that leads up to the divine, to the infinite. When we find it in diversity, when we find it as that which appears to us as light, when we have left the darkness, then it is Eros that leads us there, leads us up to the infinite. So it is Eros that Socrates presents as the guide to the essence. Eros, love, confronts us in the same way as in India, when Krishna says: "In the middle of the sun is light, in the middle of light is truth, in truth is essence."

[ 16 ] In the Platonic view, we are also confronted with the fact that the infinite being emerges in the truth that appears in the perspective of eternity. This Platonic view is accompanied by the fact that the demonic force that leads man from his immediate sensuality to the eternal view is nothing other than the demon of love.

[ 17 ] So Socrates appears to us as the one who follows Eros in order to be led up to the immediate truth. Socrates is portrayed to us in such a way that he appears in the midst of the other speakers as the clairvoyant, the clairvoyant. The "banquet" is a wild affair. They are caught up in the sensory world. And while Socrates proclaims wisdom in his speeches, other speakers fall asleep, which means that they cannot escape from the dark diversity. He talks to the comic and tragic poets and discusses ideas with them. As the last ones who have remained bright, he tries to lead them to the eternal vision. He converses with them, saying that the poet, the real poet, must be able to express the comic as well as the tragic.

[ 18 ] Here we see how Socrates goes beyond the poet, but retains his belief in poetry to the end. Here he points out that the tragic and the comic are capable of rising to the eternal. The comic and the tragic arise from the fact that the manifold is measured against unity, the [transient against the eternal,] against truth. Wherever we encounter the tragic or the comic, the spirit must in some way confront us with the sensual. The tragic hero in a tragedy only appears tragic because in him the idea ultimately triumphs over the demise of the external, the mortal. The spirit, as opposed to the earthly-material, appears as the comic. When man looks over the disharmony of the earthly, after he has already gone through a certain development on the spiritual ladder, when he thus looks back on what is going on down there, what does not appear as harmony in the manifoldness, while before his eyes it does appear as a kind of harmony, then it appears to him as humor. The one who looks back is actually the comical one in the sense in which Socrates expresses his words from the standpoint of eternal vision.

[ 19 ] And when the spiritual emphasizes the immense difficulties it has to overcome, emphasizes how difficult it is to escape from the material, when the spiritual is not held up in a light sense, but in such a way that the opposite word is held up seriously, then tragic poetry appears. [What the wise Silen answers the tragic King Midas] to the problem is: What would be best for man? The best thing for man would be not to be born and, having been born, to die soon.

[ 20 ] This is to be understood in such a way that what is enclosed in the temporal form overcomes this form and penetrates through to the eternal. This is how man overcomes tragedy. Therein lies the primal tragedy that everyone must feel who has the perspective upwards into the spiritual and downwards, depending on the mood that overcomes him, depending on whether he views the penetration from below or above. The world appears tragic or comic to him depending on his perspective. The poet must be able to deal with both the tragic and the comic, depending on the view upwards or downwards. The one who has a clear view upwards and downwards can do this.

[ 21 ] Socrates remains the clairvoyant, not like the one who sees the spiritual and the material side by side, but like the one who recognizes the interweaving of the two, who is no longer humorous and also no longer serious, but who dissolves the contrast in the great development, where the material has increased, the spiritual penetrates from above and thereby enlivens the material. It is a unified view that takes the place of the tragic and the comic. He is the wise one beside the two. They fall away, and Socrates alone remains. It is he who outlasts them. From the point of view of the Greek view of life, not as a crude symbolic representation, it should be mentioned: he drank the most. The others have fallen away. He is the one who alone remains awake. Even if this is a dubious symbol for us, it was intended to express the fact that Socrates was so far initiated that he could not be kept from his clairvoyance by any sensual-material effect. It is he in whose personality is expressed what Plato describes as the fusion of the material and the spiritual.

[ 22 ] [He was led by] Eros to the vision of eternity, to spirituality. He is sensuality transformed into spirituality. He appears in his personality as the bearer of wisdom, as the bearer of this spirituality, while the others are presented to us as those who have remained dull. Here it is the brighter spirit of Socrates who has grasped it, who has detached himself from all sensual multiplicity, who has reached it, the primeval, through the power of Eros, by which he has allowed himself to be guided.

[ 23 ] So the "Banquet" is a complete antithesis to the talk of immortality or the infinity of the soul. It is intended to show us how Socrates ascends to the eternal, while the others are attached to the temporal. The best thing is how Plato shows us how he lets [Socrates] cease as a sage and how he lets him reproduce what he has received as inspiration from the goddess, the priestess. This is proof that the Greek mystic always uses the symbol of the feminine, which represents the deepening of the state of consciousness.

[ 24 ] So we see that Plato is always talking about leading people up to deeper or higher states of consciousness. What Plato means in his view of eternity is not so clear to us in his work. It only appears to us in a later age at the same time as the emergence of Christianity in the West. We will see how these thoughts first acquire their true content through philonic mysticism.

[ 25 ] What Plato shows us as a spiritual path can also be preserved in terms of content within the West. But those who stick more to the external form of Plato have an unopened bud in him. He shows us what he has grasped in his inner being, like a bud. We will only see this bud unfold when we go beyond Plato. Just as in Plato we see the emergence of Heraclitus' philosophy, so in Philo we see the emergence of Platonic philosophy.

[ 26 ] I do not want to say that Plato did not stand on a higher level of knowledge. The ancients succeeded in saying this in a more direct way than Plato did. I would describe mysticism up to neo-Platonic mysticism as a continuous unfolding. [We have a strong folding together] with Heraclitus. He drew directly from the wisdom of the Mysteries. Heraclitus is a very important point in the dawn of Greek spiritual life. That is why Heraclitus was well aware that just as the Logos must follow descending paths in the development of the world, so matter must follow the ascending path. The Logos must spiritualize matter, and so it is called to penetrate it. At first it appears as a mere babble. Only later does the word attain the power to directly represent the spirit. Thus the whole spiritual process is a continual permeation of the word with the spirit.

[ 27 ] 600 years before the birth of Christ, the Buddha already said this. His words have a divine power. They will perhaps reveal more of themselves than what they now seem to contain. They are, as it were, the body for what they contain. They already contain this. But the body has only been able to develop through approximation. In the rise of Christianity, the spirit took possession of the word and appropriated dominion over the word at the time when the word really became flesh. Only after Plato did the word become the direct expression of the spiritual. With Plato, this is still veiled like a bud. This is also the reason why Platonic philosophy, if it is taken merely in an exoteric sense without the deeper mystical insight, cannot directly reveal what it wants to reveal. After all, it has the abyss-like depth of all essential penetration. But this depth is still resolved in the depths of the matter itself. The outer garment of the Platonic dialogues has not yet received all the wisdom driven out of it. And this is where the assertion that Platonic philosophy contains contradictions comes from.

[ 28 ] In the juxtaposition of the material with the spiritual, one sees [according to Plato] a kind of "Achilles heel", and we must also admit this for the exoteric. Platonic mysticism only becomes comprehensible if we look at it esoterically, as we tried to do with the Phaedo and the Banquet. But if we take it in this way, many things become clear to us that would otherwise seem incoherent. On the one hand, Plato places the view of ideas, on the other the world of sensual existence. Plato did not succeed in showing that the one is actually also the other, that the one rules in the other. He did not succeed in showing that "I" is "You" and "You" is "I", that the individual does not have the right to speak "I" to himself, that he may only say "I" to himself when he has overcome the individual ego.

[ 29 ] Plato contrasted the earthly diversity and the unity hovering above the earthly. He must overcome the sensual being and can then advance to the eternal. How then does the temporal appear to us? The temporal is powerless in the face of the eternal. The temporal is not spiritualized by the eternal. Plato has not found a transition. Plato has the eternal, but not as the eternal creator. Plato does not know the creative, divine personality, says the Christian. Temporality belongs to creation, says the Christian to Plato. He may have referred to the eternal, but he did not understand how to explain the temporal through the eternal, how to harmonize them. This can rightly be said if one takes an exoteric view of the matter.

[ 30 ] Plato distinguishes between two types of knowledge. Sensory knowledge or the wisdom of temporality and the wisdom of infinity. And here we have come to see how its bud must be made to burst open. The one who still sees "I" and "You" as separate has not yet reached the point where the being is "one". He therefore knows that there are two kinds of knowledge, the wisdom of the infinite and the wisdom of the finite. But he also knows that these two kinds of knowledge only appear as two as long as the being itself is caught up in multiplicity, in finiteness. He points out not to contrast two kinds of knowledge in the absolute sense, but to recognize that there is a ladder in the direction where wisdom leads, that one can indeed lift oneself up to wisdom.

[ 31 ] We always see beings developing upwards to divinity, from sensual knowledge to divine knowledge. We can also see this as a characteristic of the Greek striving for wisdom, that the Greek sage was aware that on his path of wisdom the earthly must also be transformed into the eternal, that he must also rise on the path of wisdom, that knowledge must not remain where it is worldly knowledge, but that just as the religious must set out on the path, so must he who seeks wisdom set out on the same path. The Greek sage is aware that the pursuit of wisdom is one of the paths to the infinite.

[ 32 ] Here is what led Heraclitus to find the right expression, what led Heraclitus to real theosophy, to real philosophy. He made the distinction between earthly and divine wisdom. When the soul ascends from the body to the free ether, then it will be an immortal God, then knowledge is on the way to becoming divine wisdom. - Viewing from the eternal perspective of the gods, becoming God - that is what the Greek development of wisdom strives for. Not a knowledge of a place or thing lying behind things, but a becoming wisdom, that is what Greek development strives for.

[ 33 ] I think we have seen that Platonic mysticism is one of the most important stages in the Greek pursuit of wisdom from the earthly-temporal, from purely human opinion to divine wisdom.

Answer to the question:

[ 34 ] "Timaeus" and "Phaedo", which lead out of philosophy into mysticism, are the pinnacles of Platonic philosophy. These will then lead us to the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse.

[ 35 ] Socrates looks down on suffering and joy from a higher point of view.

[ 36 ] The manifold is not to be overcome in knowledge, but as such itself. In the mystery of Christ, death itself is overcome as such, not merely in the realization that death is nothing. Suffering, which Socrates only had to console himself about, must here be conquered, overcome. Victory must be achieved. There must be an absolute necessity for this victory to be achieved.

[ 37 ] Wisdom is merely an abbreviation of the path. In exoteric terms, Plato shortened it to a third. Man has to overcome death through initiation, through the divine within the purely spiritual, as with Plato through knowledge. Not everyone can walk the path of wisdom. There must therefore also be a path that runs in real life, where the Word made flesh, the spirit made corporeal, is the overcoming. That is why the Socratic overcoming is there for the wise. For the ordinary man, however, the Socratic overcoming cannot exist under ordinary circumstances. For the higher truths and insights there is no great difference. But there is a great difference for the human being. Hübbe-Schleiden expresses it like this: Mysticism is of the highest value to man; but he who wants to bring the whole race on the path must also take spiritual knowledge to his aid. That is why this idea relates to the Socratic idea as life relates to the spirit. The salvation that is achieved through the Christ idea is salvation in life as opposed to salvation in the mere spirit.