The Regions Without

Near the beginning of Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates and his companion arrive at a glade near a river at which a mythical event involving one of the Greek gods had taken place. Phaedrus asks Socrates if he believes the story—and, by extension, the Greek myth-religion—was true. In Socrates’ reply we see that the discussion between science and religion started well before Darwin or Galileo.

"I should be quite in the fashion if I disbelieved it, as the men of science do. I might proceed to give a scientific account [of the events in the myth]…For my part, Phaedrus, I regard such theories as no doubt attractive, but as the invention of clever, industrious people who are not exactly to be envied, for the simple reason that they must then go on and tell us the real truth about the appearance of centaurs and the Chimera, not to mention a whole host of such creatures, Gorgons and Pegasuses and countless other remarkable monsters of legend flocking in on them. If our skeptic, with his somewhat crude science, means to reduce every one of them to the standard of probability, he’ll need a deal of time for it. I myself have certainly no time for the business, and I’ll tell you why, my friend. I can’t as yet ‘know myself,’ as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, an so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. Consequently I don’t bother about such tings, but accept the current beliefs about them."

The wisdom with which Socrates dismisses the myths and “clever inventions” of science is matched by his insistence that “I myself have certainly no time for the business.”

The dialogue continues with speeches about the nature of love. Because Socrates ultimately argues that love is a response to beauty that grows the wings of the soul so it might ascend back to heaven and the source of all beauty, he first digresses on the nature and origin of the soul. In a passage both elevating and inscrutable, he describes how

"There awaits the soul the extreme of her toil and struggling. For the souls that are called immortal, so soon as they are at the summit [of the heavens], come forth and stand upon the back of the world, and straightaway the revolving heaven carries them round, and they look upon the regions without.

"Of that place beyond the heavens none of our earthly poets has yet sung…It is there that true being dwells…reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof."

The image is as beautiful as it is bizarre, and more mysticism than philosophy. Most today would dismiss it as the idle scribbling of just another self-impressed dreamer.

Plato’s greatness shows in that he seems to agree, yet push on anyway. A dialogue filled with Plato’s clever inventions began with Socrates dismissing the “clever inventions” of human speculation. Near the end Socrates disdains written words “which seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything bout what they say…they go on telling you just the same thing forever.” Astonishingly, he bluntly asserts “nothing that has ever been written whether in verse or prose merits much serious attention.”

Presumably, what Plato thinks merits serious attention is not his writings, but those “regions without.”