While teaching an in situ program in Castiglione Fiorentino, Italy, one of the "situ" that we were "in" was the Vatican City Galleries and Museum. For one of my classes, "The Truths in Painting," perhaps the single most important visual image for the class was the Pope's chambers painted by no less than Raphael, highlighted by his "Scuola di Atene (School of Athens)" mural.
The painting, along with Raphael's bored-looking cherubs at the base of his Sistine Madonna, is perhaps the most widely recognized work by the artist.
In the center stand Plato and Aristotle, apparently having a philosophical discussion. Plato is seen pointing upwards, investigating the things above the earth, while Aristotle points doggedly to the floor, symbolizing his insistence upon the material universe to be championed above the ethereal Ideals of his former teacher, Plato.
Plato and Aristotle are the direct inheritors of the "curse" of Socrates in that they have come to represent two main ways of viewing reality: either as a Platonist who believes that this world is a flawed, less-than-perfect embodiment of a divine original Ideal world; or as a Aristotlean, believing that more or less, "what you see is what you get."
On the one hand, I remember having a conversation with a friend who is a patent lawyer of bio-medical devices, and in the middle of a discussion, he declared, "I am an Aristotlean" but at the same time acknowledged that he had never read a word of Aristotle. Another friend, said something similar when he was defending his choice to eat veal without remorse, more or less condensing a Heraclitian "man as the measure of all things" and Aristotle's teleological stance of "happiness." Neither one of them is "wrong" for saying what they did, but it is curious how deep these distinctions go in our society.
On the other hand, Platonic has come to be associated with relationships, rather than if there is a God or not. What is rather ironic about this is that the description that many people give about a "Platonic Relationship" is often conflated with no less than Aristophanes' description of "soul mates" in Plato's Symposium, and is then likewise attributed to Socrates, who was ridiculed by Aristophanes in his comedy, "The Clouds". Oh, what a tangled net we weave.
To return to Raphael's painting, one way the distinction has been made is by James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus who contemplates the Ephinany and tries to explain it to his friend Cranly in Joyce's bildungsroman "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Is there a whatness of horseness, meaning an essence of being "a horse," or is it a horseness of whatness, in that there is a part of everything in the whole of "whatness?"
Socrates' predilection for horse analogies was not lost on Joyce. However, what happened to the "horse" of Athens, once the "gadfly" of Socrates had been swatted down once and for all?
I imagine that wannabe philosophers might have begun to think twice about such an occupation that could prove to be lethal. More than just being banned, speaking out loud your thoughts that might irk your neighbor could quite easily lead to a witch hunt and a trial for your life.
Socrates warned that the great horse of Athens was wont to be lazy, to wallow in a lethargic stupor, getting angry when stung by his stories of horses, cobblers, and incessant questioning.
Not to be so bold as to assert that the Death of Socrates was the end of Athens, but I would go so far as to say it was a pebble in the waters that began to ripple rather largely. Was the "nature" of the horse, the great city of Athens, one of inertia? Sir Isaac Newton's later works on gravity and inertia may not have been as timely as they were without the history of scientific thought initiated by Plato's student, Aristotle, but that does not diminish there importance. Is a great force subject to die by its own inertia then? When we are not goaded and prodded and annoyed and irked into motion, would we too not more often than not, just take a metaphysical nap?
Whether pointing up or down, the question I put to my students when viewing the painting is simple, "What do you think?"
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