Martha Nussbaum says that Plato recanted many of his earlier opinions in his final dialogue of the Phaedrus, in which he suggests that a man must give way to, or give expression to, the madness of love in order to remain human. This too is as false as his earlier dialogues explaining that the philosopher’s life was the perfect life. Love is not always madness; sometimes it is the greatest miracle of sanity and self-sacrifice. Conrad in his novels tells wonderful stories, which I enjoyed as a schoolboy because they were mostly about the sea; and when read carefully, they are all love-stories. They range from the slavery of a debased obsession with a woman’s body in The Outcast of the Isles, to the self-sacrificing love of The Rover. He studies with deep understanding the many facets of love; all of which Plato grouped under the bracket of madness. The truth is that Plato’s attitude to sex and love was nauseating, particularly his attitude towards young boys.
The other objection to Plato is the goal he reached eventually in his Republic. His picture of an ideal state resembles Sparta or Nazi Germany more than any other. That too is nauseating, because not to put too fine a gloss on it, despite all its fine principles, it is dictatorship. Martha Nussbaum stresses that Aristotle always insisted on returning to experience; he knew all too well the danger of taking an argument to its logical conclusion, namely that you end up with contradiction or absurdity. I doubt if he appreciated that every frame of mind was based on its assumptions, which might or might not be true, and which were probably partly true and partly false; but he knew very well that logic is only valuable up to a point, and beyond that point can lead to absurdity, even if he did not grasp the reason for it. But he was right about Plato’s logic leading to a result, which was either absurd or revolting, whichever way you look at it.
One can reach the same conclusion another way. Plato sought ideal forms, which would have a permanence, which reality seen in human terms never seems to have. But Bertrand Russell says in his History of Western Philosophy that what we have inherited from Parmenides is the idea of the “indestructibility of substance”; and I have certainly understood from friends who ought to know that the majority of modern philosophies are still based on the permanence of substance. But modern physics, with which I am superficially familiar, insists that all matter is highly destructible. Einstein’s equation, the first term of which is E=mc², postulates that ultimately all matter can be converted into energy. And even if classical physics talked about laws of conservation of energy, on the grand scale as on the small energy is degradable; because the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics records the practical experience that everything grinds to a halt, and as Entropy increases energy becomes less and less usable.
Plato inherited this idea of permanence from Parmenides; and in doing so built his philosophy on a false basis. In my theory of consciousness, I steer well clear of substance, and avoid it like the plague, for this very reason. Instead I make the basis of my theory the “perfectly relaxed consciousness”; but I do not suggest this is the same for everyone, for the simple reason no-one can ever know if his consciousness is completely relaxed. It may be; or it may not be. I also use the phrase the “consciousness of God” as a shorthand way of referring to it; but no-one can say if His consciousness always remains always the same; and I very much doubt if it does. I almost take refuge in Descartes’ Discourse on Method, in which he argues, “I think therefore I am”; except that I part company with him when he says the only thing he can be sure of is that he thinks and doubts. I reckon that the consciousness and the thinking process are themselves very much subject to change; and not to be relied on. But experience of the external world, which includes our ability to interpret it, enables us to be sufficiently sure of enough in life, at any rate to guide our conduct in our immediate present circumstances. So I reckon I have avoided all the pitfalls of the past, and learned to rely, as I gather Aristotle said one should, only on the truth of experience. Hence my immodest view that my theory of consciousness is a vast improvement on anything that has gone before.