The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the rise of philosophy
Dionysus was born anew. This principle no longer lived as a power of mystical
insight, but as a force of conscience, appearing as the voice of the daimon. It
was this inmost experience which caused the young man, whose name was at
first Aristocles, the offspring of Solon, to burn his poems and change his name
to Plato, which meant “broad.” “I thank God,” he said, “that I was born Greek
and not barbarian, freeman and not a slave, man and not a woman; but above
all that I was born in the age of Socrates.”
Plato not only looked back to Socrates’ teaching and death, he looked further
back, to the past of the world’s existence. His world conception culminated in
anamnesis, the remembrance by the soul of its existence before its birth in the
realm of ideas. The world was split into two parts for Plato: the world of ideas
and the world of objects, of matter. His main thesis was that objects can be seen
but never thought and ideas can be thought but not seen. The strict conception
of a duality between matter and spirit cut a gap between the world of the soul
and the body, which, he declared cannot be bridged in our earthly existence.
Our body is, in Plato’s view, the prison of the soul and the spirit; they live as
prisoners as long as the body exists. To this idea Plato gave the clearest expression
in the parable in his Republic (VII): “Behold, human beings living in an
underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all
along the den; here they have been from childhood and have their legs and
necks chained so that they cannot move and can only see before them, being
prevented by the chains from turning their heads around. Above and behind
them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there
is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like
the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they
show the puppets … and do you see men passing along the wall … they are
strange prisoners, like ourselves, and they see only their own shadows or the
shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.”
Certainly a most pessimistic view of our earthly existence and a most miserable
valuation of our cognition on earth!
In Plato’s writings there is always mourning over our lost paradise, and
his anxious revival of the past is motivated by a recognition of the fact that
we are children of Deucalion, of the dark age, and that the blindness of the
eyes of our soul cuts us off from the world of the ideas in which we lived