Ideas for a Platonic Accademy
This is an idea which aims to unite two activities which are normally thought to stand apart. These are the ongoing debate about how to improve our social and economic institutions and practices, and the equally ongoing task of personal inner self-development.
The Two-fold problem facing humankind
In order to improve our society and our economy, to make them more equitable and more efficient, we need to be able to know the actual state of the existing social and economic life, and to do this we need information and data on what is going on. Whilst every human being working in society and in business will have some direct and personal experience of how things are, no one person, or even one single group of people, can have an accurate picture of the whole. However good our own expertise we are always looking at things from our own perspective, be that as business executive, manufacturer, social worker, teacher or dispossessed landless family. We thereby view society from our own unique personal and professional perspective, with all the colouring that it brings. The aggregate of these perspectives are described using various social-statistical modeling techniques which, fill the place of a qualitative objective overview. We might have some notion of weather or not our income is above or below average but it is only when seen in the context of the national income statistics that we can know objectively whether indeed our income is above or below average.
Of course this assumes that statistics paint an accurate picture of the true social and economic situation. In the last few decades our society has embarked upon a data producing frenzy. Increasingly every aspect of our lives is logged, monitored and measured like never before. Whilst this increasing stream of raw data provides vast quantities of information it is questionable to what degree anyone has the ability to correlate and pattern this into a meaningful model of the whole.
The information available to us tends to be used to promote the interests, or to cover up the failings, of particular interest groups. Rarely does economic data become correlated with environmental data, for example, and politicians are renowned for their ability to 'spin' the figures to prove their point. Data spinning is becoming a rapidly increasing trend, which presents us with a social irony. Whilst our ability to collect and store information is increasing rapidly, our ability to create meaningful objective pictures from it is deteriorating.
Setting aside any moral considerations, for the moment, if we want to create a genuinely objective and holistic picture of the world with the information we have gathered we have to find a way of simplifying the way we build up our social models, whilst at the same time ensuring that the picture that we create is as objective and as accurate as possible. To emphasize this, we need to develop tools for identifying meaningful interrelationships between activities in order to better inform our social a and economic actions. We need to create a social climate in which there is a genuine desire to find solutions to our growing global problems and, at the same time, to move us away from the squabbling and vying for position which is so frequently adopted with such depressing consequences. We need to find ways of inspiring ourselves to work for positive outcomes which exceed our current low expectations and at the same time to re-invigorate our desire for self-improvement and self development.
A good starting point is to begin with the whole as a whole, and work down into the details. Rather than wasting effort and resources fighting over which piece of the jigsaw is the centre it is better to acknowledge that the world in its entirety is the centre and all of the pieces are indispensably unique but relative.
So where does Plato figure in all of this? The man known as Plato (427-347 BC), has come to embody a kind of reasoning and logic which takes its starting point from the whole and then works down into the details. He helped to establish the rules of rational logical analytical thinking which we today take for granted. Whilst Plato looked back to the ultimate source of all things, Aristotle looked out into nature and applied the same reasoning and methods of analysis to the world of nature. Today we excel in the analysis and compartmentalisation of the outer world, in the ongoing development of Aristotle's methodology, but have lost sight of Plato's legacy of universal synthesis. These two create a natural mutual balance. In the illustration at the top of this article Plato stands with upright arm, representing his emphasis with the relationship between heaven and earth, whilst Aristotle stands with horizontal arm, representing his concern with relationships in the widths of the natural world. At present we excel in explaining and catagorising objects in nature but we have not applied the same amount of effort to the inner-space, to the world of our own being. We have thereby largely lost sight of the needs of our own inner lives.
The development and cultivation of inner (moral) capacities used to be the province of religion, of church and state. To a large extent it was imposed on the individual human being from the outside, rather in the way that modern consumer culture is imposed on people today. The resultant collapse of the common religious life, at least in the West, has left the human being more to their own devices with regard to inner development. This state of affairs is a two-edged sword, for whilst it liberates us from social and religious convention, leaving us free to define our own direct relationship to Reality, it also leaves us free to do nothing in the way of inner development. Consequently our relationship to God is as uniquely idiosyncratic or as non-existent as we care to make it.
In the West, at least, where the old religious forms and practices are at their most threadbare, there has emerged a whole range of responses to inner development. In their entirety these are often referred to as the New Age Movement. In place of a small number of long-standing religions, each seeking to embrace the whole of human kind with their particular reality picture, we have thousands of religious and spiritual forms, including the atheistic-mechanical ones. It would seem that the sheer array of possibilities for inner self-development and the sheer volume of information, treatise, texts of interpretation, personal testimonials and schools of meditation and self developmental practice is as equally daunting, in its own way as the mountains of natural and social data about the state of our planet and the condition of our economy.
Is there a common starting point for orienting ourselves in relation to the phenomena of the outer world and the inner world? We believe there is. Indeed our are belief in this fact is the cornerstone of this project. In the case of the outer world and nature the starting point is the fact that, the world we live in is a unified whole. If we extend this principle then Reality is a unified whole, appearing in two aspects, one we can experience though our physical senses, and which is visible, and one which we experience 'inwardly', which is non-physical.
This Unity of Existence, both in its physical and non-physical aspects, together make up the whole of Reality. If we take this as our starting point, even if we do not know all the details, we will at least have an objective beginning for our attempts to understand both the physical and the non-physical worlds. This is the objective starting point taken by Plato.
Developing a working method for holistic problem solving
When we think of our ability to think logically we think of our ability to make true and false statements and then to take either/or decisions. For example, the statement "all dogs are animals", coupled with the statement "Rover is a dog" gives us all the information we need to come to the conclusion that Rover is an animal. This trivial example allows us to decide whether we need to take Rover to the doctors or to the vet. Whilst this might seem obvious to us, but there was a time in history when this capacity to reason and to act upon the basis of independent judgments represented the cutting edge of personal and social development. The mental capacity to manipulate this 'either-or' rule has become so ingrained in us that we habitually look for two sides to every problem and expect to chose between two possible solutions. Some 2,500 years have passed since the early development of this two-fold reasoning. The subsequent evolution and development of human consciousness means that this capacity, when used exclusively, is becoming more of a hindrance to our future evolution than a help.
What lies at the heart of logical reasoning is the ability to take two simple elements our of a far more complex system and determine their relationship to each other in a specific context; to decide, for example, which is the cause and which is the effect, for example. To perceive meaningful relationships between things and to arrive at true and false statements about the world. When we do this we take the underlying context, that the world is ultimately unified and self consistent and thereby held together by meaningful relationships, totally for granted.
This black and white, either-or, way of viewing the world (or in the above illustration, red and blue), is beginning to hold us back. For Plato, the ability to work with logical dualism arose as a consequence of his starting point, which was an assumption of the essential unity of existence.
Dualism is an artificial mental tool for manipulating and building meaningful models of reality. It is not reality itself. Taken out of the context of unity the information which dualism yields is at best limited and at worst misleading. Without reference to a common denominator, constantly splitting things up into either-or categories only serves to fragment things into ever smaller mutually irreconcilable pieces. What was once a cutting edge mental asset is now becoming quite literally, divisive. We need to re-establish our experience of the whole - to develop our capacity to reason in a holistic context. At the beginning of the 21st century the need to develop such a holistic framework is equally important for society, the economy and for personal development.
A way of analyzing and experiencing the world which is at once holistic and reasonable is urgently needed. Such a method of reasoning has to take as its starting point, and have as its constant source of reference, the Oneness of Existence. The gateway to an experience of this Oneness or Uniqueness arises when opposites are reconciled in a way which remains logically reasonable. We call the kind of reasoning which re-embraces unity through the reconciliation of dualism meta-logic.
To give a concrete illustration. Opposites are reconciled when they are seen, from a more all embracing perspective, to be but two extreme states of a single process, or phenomena. Traditionally God is regarded as being free of limitation and is often described in a paradoxical way, as the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, for instance. To practically demonstrate this consider the circumference of a circle. If we wanted to take a journey around the world and set out westwards from London, so long as we kept to a straight line, at the same latitude, we would eventually re-enter London from the west. Although traveling in a straight line in a single direction we would eventually return to our starting point. Our beginning and our end point would quite literally be the same.
Whilst still en-route we could indulge in all manner of debate where we were in relation to the beginning and the end of our journey
The Platonic Academy project strives to develop holistic and practical examination of events and processes be these of a social, natural or spiritual nature. Taking Plato's starting point of Unity we make the assumption that contradictory points of view arise when the context in which they are being viewed is too narrow. We are therefore developing a set of practical tools and methods for broadening the context of any problem in such a way that opposition through contradiction can be overcome. We believe that such an approach to problem solving can yield practical and fruitful personal, social and economic results. For example, the duality between the environmental movement and the worlds corporations is ultimately reconcilable in the acknowledgement of the simple fact that the healthy and viable long-term functioning of the earths living systems is essential to the success of both environmental and business aspirations. It being simultaneously the home of the former and the source of all the raw materials of the latter. On one level the agendas of these two groups seem to be mutually contradictory as far as the status of the natural world is concerned. But a deeper analysis makes it plain that the ultimate goals of both must be identical, namely to create a sustainable relationship between nature and humanity. Whether this is described in terms of sustainable markets for goods and services or in terms of living eco-systems which are managed in such a way that they do not collapse is secondary. By focusing on the common denominator, serving as a mutual starting point for agreement, the steps towards achieving biological sustainability can be worked on in partnership.
We are concerned to develop logical and actual self consistency of both the physical 'outer' world and the non-physical 'inner' world. furthermore we work on the assumption the these two worlds are inter-related and influence each other, and ultimately define each other.
To create a set of integrated and sensible relationships between seemingly unrelated subject matter, in such a way as to encourage fruitful development.
Not to limit the scope of the issues covered or to artificially compartmentalize them and particularly to avoid the artificial separation between outer social and economic development and inner personal development.
To highlight the inadequacies of limited black and white thinking and to promote the development of a more integrated approach to problem solving, based upon overall self-consistency rather than the simplistic competition of apparently opposing points of view.
To encourage the culture of attempting to build up an objective picture of a situation, based upon the contributions of diverse stakeholders.