By Katherine Forbes
March 27, 2012
On page 195 of The Last Battle Uncle Kirke references Plato’s notion of ‘ideas’ behind perceptions when describing the experience of going further up and further in. Lewis had an extensive education in the classics by modern standards and it’s interesting that he would reference that particular philosophy alongside a concept which wouldn’t initially appear related. I happened to run across a passage in Plato’s Republic which may form the connection between Plato and several of the ideas Lewis develops in The Last Battle. The passage is from Chapter 9, section 586a, but I’ll give a brief description of the argument Socrates engages in leading up to the passage, starting at 582a.
The question Socrates poses is the following, “what is the measure of occupations (how one spends time); and how does one know he is living the most pleasantly (nobly) and least painfully (shamefully)?” The first towards an answer is found at section 584e-585a: When you are sick, you prioritize the desire to be healthy. When you go from being healthy to sick, your definition of illness becomes limited to what you are experiencing; even if you had once been far more ill on a different occasion, your perspective has been altered to the present experience of illness. In the same way, people become acclimated to things: when you become acclimated to the cold, your definition of cold changes. “Then would you be surprised if those who are inexperienced in truth, as they have unhealthy opinions about other things, so too they are disposed toward pleasure and pain and what’s between them…. And as though out of lack of experience of white they looked from gray to black, out of lack of experience of pleasure they look from pain to painless and are deceived?” The argument continues to a new point at 585c: “Judge it in this way: In your opinion which thing is more: one that is connected with something always the same, immortal and true, and is such itself and comes to be in such a thing; or one that is connected with something never the same and mortal, and is such itself and comes to be in such a thing?” “That which is connected with what is always the same far exceeds.”(585d-e) So if it is pleasant to become full of what is by nature suitable (food or knowledge); you would benefit more from that which is closer to being eternal (the soul) than those things which simply benefit the body, because the body has a relative perspective.
Next, starting at 586a, Socrates arrives at the important conclusion he’s trying to draw: “Therefore, those who have no experience of prudence and virtue but are always living for bodily satisfaction, it seems, are brought down and then back to the middle and throughout life wander in this way; but since they don’t go beyond this, they don’t look upward toward what is truly above, nor are they ever brought to it; and they aren’t filled with what really is, nor do they taste of a pleasure that is sure and pure; rather” they keep their faces looking down on bodily pleasures, and in pursuit of them they fight and kill each other “because they are insatiable; for they are filling the part of themselves that is, or can contain anything, with things that are.”
Socrates is of course referencing the “ideas” which he views are so important to seek out because they are closer to the truth. In class we have discussed how these ideas are perhaps farther from the truth because they can exist only in the abstract, but there might be more meaning than that in this paragraph. The action of “looking upward” to Plato is the first step towards finding truth, and I think in a non-literal sense Lewis would very much agree. If someone is looking up, they are seeking something which is outside their normal line of vision; they are questioning and actively seeking out answers. A lot of the characters in The Last Battle are absorbed in what is “down to earth”, and fail to look up and see Aslan when he stands right above them. The metaphor, I think, is the same.
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