Here’s a thought experiment borrowed by Stanford philosopher John Perry from a Barbara Harris novel called Who Is Julia?: imagine that you wake up in a hospital in a body that looks nothing like your own. Philosophers like to create brief schematic stories that they call “thought experiments.” Sometimes they’re used to shake up common assumptions. In their own ways, contemporary philosophers were as anti-body, at least from the neck down, as the Baptists of my upbringing. Yet there was little talk of wisdom and human flourishing in my college and postgraduate education. Plato and his ilk, I thought, knew more about how to live a flourishing human life than those whom I would learn in college to call the hoi polloi. Reason’s promise to provide internal harmony as well as external guidance partly explains my attraction to philosophy. My parents’ struggles with their appetites for food and drink, along with the conflicts among my own adolescent desires, made Plato’s psychology compelling. Philosophy, love of wisdom, thus brings peace to our souls. Plato claimed that when reason (the man) becomes wise enough to tame our will (the lion) and enlist its aid in pacifying our unruly desires (the monster), our violent internal chaos is transformed into harmony. The many-headed monster, unless it is held in check, will torment the lion, devour the man, and pull us willy-nilly in opposing directions. Our souls, Plato claims, behave as if they are composed of three parts: one resembling a many-headed monster, one a lion, and one a man. One selection we read contained an allegory that Plato gives for the soul. In my senior year of high school, I took a literature course in which my teacher assigned excerpts from Plato’s Republic. For both my parents, excess alternated with deprivation. During times of greatest tension between them, Mom gained extra weight. Mom’s spurts of dieting and Dad’s stretches of sobriety roughly coincided. During my lifetime, my mother was never less than a hundred pounds overweight, though she tried every slimming fad from Metrecal meal replacement shakes to the grapefruit diet. When Dad was off the wagon, he would have a beer with his coffee in lieu of breakfast-hair of the dog for his hangover. My dad would come home, tired and brooding, and drink tumblers of scotch and water unless he was on the wagon. M y upbringing taught me that bodies betray you, shame you, hold you hostage, pull you down. What I did not tell my students is that, for me, the image is also autobiographical. When teaching, I often used a slide of a detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens showing Plato and Aristotle to emphasize that philosophy is an ongoing dialogue. Raphael shows Plato and Aristotle relishing their debate, for their disagreements, though profound, are undergirded with a deeper common ground of hope-the hope that philosophical disputation can lead to fuller understanding and converge on truth. Aristotle argued that the very world that Plato thought unreal is the reality that matters most to us. He points upward, gesturing toward perfect, eternal, immaterial, unchanging Reality.Īristotle, carrying his Nicomachean Ethics, points his extended arm in front of him toward the world humans inhabit and know through our senses. Plato carries his Timaeus, one of the many books in which he says the temporal world is always perishing and thus less than fully real. In the painting’s focal center, Raphael shows Plato and Aristotle striding toward the viewer as they argue. Visually, The School of Athens presents philosophy as a large-scale communal enterprise carried on within a vastly larger world. Raphael’s homage to classical philosophy puts humans in their place-central, but dwarfed by the context. For me, the room functions as a compelling visual counterargument to what my Baptist upbringing and academic training had both assumed about the triviality of human imagination and the irreconcilability of Christianity with philosophy. Painted archways link the four frescoes into a visual whole which depicts reason, revelation, and imagination as collaborators-a conviction shared by most educated Christians for millennia. Literature and law face one another on the room’s shorter walls. Its most famous fresco is The School of Athens, which takes up the long wall across from Raphael’s tribute to theology. Now thousands of tourists pass through it, giving Raphael’s frescoes only a passing glance. The room was designed as a papal library where frequenters would read and reflect as their imaginations were saturated with its images. That hunger is no small part of why the Room of the Segnatura struck me forcefully when I first visited the Vatican in my late 40s. Read our latest issue or browse back issues.
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