The material basis for the ascent of idealism in the ancient world

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Olympian god Hermes: Plato promoted religion to deceive "ignorant" masses. 10 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1991 Following is the second of a series of articles on the philosophical foundations of Marxism. The articles are based on classes given by Cliff Conners at a Socialist Action national educational conference in August 1989.

Last month's article discussed the development of philosophy among the Ionian Greeks. The first Ionian philosophers were materialists; they sought the causes of things in nature itself.

In the 4th century B.C., materialism faded and idealism-spearheaded by Socrates-became the predominant philosophical tendency in ancient Greece and Rome. Why was the Socratic revolution so successful?

From a purely ideological point of view, we could say that the early materialists simply could not answer all of the questions they set out to answer. There were too many things about the real world that they just could not explain.

One obvious problem is the difference between a living body and a dead body. There is no apparent material difference, and yet there is certainly an important distinction to be made between a live human being and a corpse. How can the difference be explained other than by the presence or absence of some immaterial "life spirit" or "soul?"

The idealists also pointed out, in answer to the atomists (one of the materialist schools among the Ionian Greeks), that to describe the real world it isn't enough to account for the mere presence of a heap of atoms. You also have to account for how the atoms are organized, and how they got that way. A human body isn't just a random collection of matter; it is matter arranged in a particular form, and the form is just as important as the matter itself.

The development of a chick embryo from a mass of undifferentiated material into an intricately formed living organism seemed beyond explanation. The materialists suggested some answers, including organic evolution, but these were conjectures without evidence, and they weren't very convincing at the time.

The idealists considered the development of an egg into a chick or an acorn into an oak tree to be evidence of a cosmic plan governed by a universal intelligence. This was where the "argument from design" came from: Complex living organisms appear to have been designed—therefore there must have been a designer.

The inadequacy of the early materialists' ideas helps to explain their eclipse, but it is not the primary factor. Again, it's necessary to turn to the social context. The Socratic revolution was brought to its culmination not by Socrates, but by his pupil, Plato.

Plato's political philosophy I think the eminent historian of science George Sarton put it best when he described Plato's "Republic" as "the work of a disgruntled fanatic." Plato, he said, was "a disgruntled old man, full of political rancor, fearing and hating the crowd ... his prejudices had crystallized and he had become an old doctrinaire. ... Plato was witnessing a social revolution, and he could not bear it at all. His main concern was-how could one stop it?"

That, I think, is the key to understanding Plato. All of his philosophy was devoted to defending the interests of the ruling elite of a "slave-owning, class-divided, chauvinistic city-state which was already an anachronism." He despised Athenian democracy and praised the repressive dictatorial regime in Sparta. Because of this, Sarton compared Plato to Americans during World War II who admired fascists and the Nazis.

It is necessary to stress the link between Plato's idealism and his politics. As classical scholar Benjamin Farrington puts it: "The whole philosophy of Plato is a political philosophy, and the controlling purpose of his whole life ... was the construction of a system of belief and a system of education which, being imposed by the governing authority, would guarantee the wellbeing of the State."

Plato upholds the "noble lie"

Plato is sometimes thought of as a philosopher who personified the ideals of truth and truthfulness as the highest virtues. This is extremely ironic, because Plato, in fact, believed that government was only possible on the basis of a lie. According to Farrington, he "devoted his life to the elaboration" of that lie.

To uphold that lie, Plato urged that the books of the materialist philosophers, the Ionians, be destroyed, and "that his own fraudulent book [the 'Laws'] should be imposed by the State as the one and only obligatory source of doctrine." For dissenters who objected to his plans, he advocated the death penalty. This is Plato's idea of a political utopia, as he spells it out in "The Republic."

What was the famous "noble lie" that Plato wanted to impose as the official doctrine of the State? Here is how he describes it in "The Republic." He wrote in dialogue form, of course, and he has one of his interlocutors ask him: "How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spokejust one royal lie?"

Then he answers: "I propose to communicate [the audacious fiction] gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. Citizens, we shall say to them ... you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of OCTOBER command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen [farmers and workers] he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children...

This, then, was Plato's "noble lie" that social distinctions were created by God and that the ruling class is the ruling class because God made its members out of better material. The rulers, the aristocrats, are the Golden Men, while the ordinary people are made of brass and iron.

As part of this effort, Plato promoted two separate religions-a sophisticated, abstract one for the intelligentsia, and a cruder one, with the old Olympian-type gods and goddesses, for the ignorant masses.

As part of his program, Plato explicitly counterposed his idealism to the materialism of the Ionians, who either did not believe in the gods at all, or believed that if there are gods, they take no interest in human affairs.

Three anti-elitist schools Aristotle didn't agree with Plato on everything, but he did support the idea that untrue religions were a political necessity; he called them "myths that have been introduced to persuade the multitude, and on account of their utility in regard of social custom and the public good." Also, while Aristotle's philosophy was quite different from Plato's, it was still fundamentally a variety of idealism.

Aristotle founded his Lyceum as a rival school to Plato's Academy, but it, too, was an elitist institution, only open to upper-class youth. In opposition to both of them, three anti-elitist schools arose in Athens, and these sought support among the common people. They were the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Cynics.

The Cynics in particular "appealed to those who felt themselves simple and oppressed;" their doctrine has been called "the philosophy of the proletariat of the Greek world." [Farrington.] It's necessary to remember, though, that the proletariat of the ancient world was not the same as the modern proletariat-it was not a class of wage-workers.

The Cynics might best be compared to the hippies of the 1960s. Their social protest took the form of ostentatious renunciation of prevailing cultural norms. Like the hippies, they wore outrageous clothes and adopted provocatively anti-establishment lifestyles as a means of shocking the solid citizens. The Cynics, then, represented for the most part a negative reaction to the oppressive social system. Like the hippies, they attracted a lot of attention, but were just a passing phenomenon.

The Stoics were a more serious tendency. Most of the Stoic teachers were Asians-non-Greeks who naturally were repelled by the chauvinism of Plato's and Aristotle's schools. To Plato, Asians were barbarians, and all barbarians were enemies by nature; to Aristotle, Asians were slaves by nature. The Stoics' answer was to stress the essential similarity of all human beings—that all men are brothers—in support of the ideal of the solidarity of the human race.

But alas, the Stoics eventually sold out. Their political trajectory was very similar to that of the Christians, who came later. They started out as militant opponents of the status quo, but as they grew and became established they began to seek respectability, and to seek accommodation with the ruling powers, and finally they wound up supporting the society they had previously challenged.

Epicureans defend materialism The third tendency, the Epicureans, started out very much like the Stoics. In fact, at first they were often confused with each other; many outsiders had a hard time telling them apart. But there were two big differences. First, the Stoics were idealists and the Epicureans were materialists. And second, the Epicureans never sold out; the consistency of their doctrine over seven centuries is remarkable.

The Epicureans are of particular interest to us because they were the primary defenders of materialism in the ancient world. Epicurus did not like Plato at all, and derisively called him the "Golden Man." He hated Plato's "noble lie" and his use of religious superstition as a political tool. Farrington praised Epicurus as "the first man known to history to have organized a movement for the liberation of mankind from superstition."

Something of the social character of the Epicurean school can be seen in the fact that it was the only school that admitted women and slaves to membership.

The Epicurean school was not a revolutionary political party. Epicurus's battle was ideological, not political—in fact, he urged his followers to avoid politics. Some Marxist philosophers, including George Novack, have criticized Epicurus for this, but I'm inclined to be more indulgent. In Greek and Roman society, the material basis was lacking on which to create a more advanced social structure, so revolutionary politics would have been an exercise in futility.

What I've been trying to illustrate is that the ideological struggle between materialism and idealism had a social basis. Idealism did not come out on top because Plato was smarter than Epicurus or because his ideas were superior in any objective sense. Idealism triumphed because it served as ideological support for the rule of a small privileged elite. In the "Communist Manifesto," Karl Marx and Frederick Engels observed: "The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."

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prognosis for political power was in their hands, the toiling masses did not stop with ousting the Tsar. They went beyond making a democratic revolution to making a socialist revolution.

The "expropriation of the expropriators"—as Marx called it—by the toiling masses did not vault revolutionary Russia beyond its economic backward-