The Platonist Tradition and the Ordering of Knowledge Essay -- Educati

The Platonist Tradition and the Ordering of Knowledge ABSTRACT: I argue that the contemporary crisis in education — that nothing appears valid as a discipline unless it has a utilitarian value — may be challenged from the perspective of the Platonist tradition. The ascent through philosophy to the vision of Beauty in itself in Plato's Symposium affirms the perception of beauty or nobility as the ultimate end and value of all knowledge. Marsilio Ficino's adaption of Plato in the Renaissance articulates a more metaphysical ascent which broadens the objects of knowledge in order to include the cosmos and the arts as well as philosophy. Together, these two accounts provide a foundation for understanding the ordering of all knowledge toward the end of the perception of beauty or nobility. There is no dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities: there is only a hierarchy of disciplines according to a scale of metaphysical nobility. The sciences, the arts, history, and philosophy are the steps toward knowledge of Beauty in itself. They constitute a vision of liberal education that is not utilitarian, but whose value must be understood precisely through the moral concept of nobility that is the end of such an education. In embracing the concept of beauty or nobility, liberal education affirms the value of life itself. The task of education today is beset increasingly by utilitarian pressures. Mathematics and the sciences seem to be of little interest in themselves, valued only for the Cartesian goal of making humanity the "masters and possessors of nature." (1) The arts are despised, and history and literature simply dismissed—for these require not only reading with care, but the perception of significance within the daunti... ...tary VI. 4, p. 112. (12) Ibid. V. 2, p. 86. Pulchritudo is Ficino's word for "beauty." (13) Ibid. V. 6, pp. 93-94. (14) Ibid. VII. 15, p. 172. (15) On this development, see Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts," in Renaissance Thought and the Arts, pp. 163-227. (16) Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, ed. Martin Kemp (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 71; On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Rykwert, Leach, and Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), p. 303. (17) See the selections in Elizabeth G. Holt, ed., A Documentary History of Art, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 2: 74-86, 141-46. (18) On the importance of narrative, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 215-16. (19) Aristotle, The Politics, I, 1-2, 1252 a1 - 1253 a35. (20) See G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, especially the Introduction.