Plato, Aristotle, Yeats and Kavanagh
Two philosophers - Plato and Aristotle. Both had the same question - what is reality? Plato held that what is truly Real is to be found in the eternal ideals that never change no matter what happens on earth, his one-time student Aristotle disagreed. No, the real is here, in everyday life, in objects that can be measured and quantified.
Two and a half thousand years later, we had two Irish poets - W.B Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, and yet the same differing viewpoints on where the real is to be found. Yeats, the idealist, immersed in the philosophy of the East (where some people say Plato and Socrates got their inspiration from), quoted the following lines in Sailing to Byzantium:
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
And we can see again here a yearning for something beyond worldly experience in these lines from ‘A Stolen Child’:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
In contrast, we have Kavanagh, the small farmer growing seeing God in the fields and banks hedgrows of his native Monaghan, in the everyday goings-on of country life, as expressed so beautifully in his poem Innocence:
They laughed at one I loved-
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love’s doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.
Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.
But now I am back in her briary arms
The dew of an Indian Summer lies
On bleached potato-stalks
What age am I?
I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.
When I was studying both of them at school, I definitely sympathised more with Kavanagh. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that both my parents came from very close to where he lived so I had a real feeling for the landscape, but also I was never keen on the excessive symbolism employed by Yeats (still am’nt - is am’nt a word?). But also I was very drawn to his way of seeing beauty in the everyday, in the here and now.
It’s funny, they always say you become more conservative as you grow older - less idealistic and more practical, less Platonic and more Aristotelian. I think the opposite is happening with me - not totally, mind, I still have a healthy avoidance of pure ideas that cannot be verified in the inner laboratory of the heart - but, like Yeats, I am beginning to look more and more for my inspiration to a higher reality rather in than the to and fro of everyday life.
Ultimately, however, I think both philosophies are just two matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that Eastern philosophy has managed to put together for thousands of years. My own teacher, Sri Chinmoy, being very much immersed in this timeless stream of Oriental wisdom, often refers to the transcendent Reality and the everyday reality as ‘God the Creator’ and ‘God the Creation’ . We can see that the Creation has been evolving and becoming more perfect, evolving more and more into the idea of the Creator to which it aspires. However - and this is the beautiful thread that links the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle together - that the creation can only evolve once we love and accept it for what it is. As Sri Chinmoy says: “We have to accept the world as it is now. If we don’t accept a thing, how can we transform it? If a potter does not touch the lump of clay, how is he going to shape it into a pot? The world around us is not perfect, but we also are not perfect. Perfect perfection has not yet dawned. We have to know that humanity at present is far, far from perfection. But we are also members of that humanity. How are we going to discard our brothers and sisters who are our veritable limbs? I cannot discard my arm; it is impossible. Similarly, when we meditate soulfully, devotedly, we have to accept humanity as our very own.”
Not only can the two go together, but adopting one to the exclusion of the other tends to an imbalance - For example, those who rely too much on Platonic ideals tend to try to create a utopian society which, as the philosopher Karl Popper argued, can quickly turn into a totalitarian one because not everyone sees the Truth in their own way. But those who go to the other extreme might also lose any sight of a higher goal to life, and stay ensnared in the weary cyclical churn of events without making any forward movement. So there is a need for a ‘middle path’, just like that advocated by that most well known exponent of Eastern wisdom - the Buddha. Although the Buddha’s philosophy is always said by many to be mind-based, I always feel the ‘middle path’ is something that can always be felt by going inside your own heart and listening to the inner feeling you get there, whereas following the mind is always what drives one to extremes. And here too is no different - one can place oneself in the peace and vastness of heart, as it aspires upwards to the Platonic goal, and at the same time reaches outwards in Aristotelian empathy with the myriad forms of life.
