Ernest Gellner

Plough, Sword and Book

The central intuition of generic Platonism is the independent existence of concepts, 'Ideas'. These entities simultaneously constitute logical and moral models for reality. The transcendent receives formal recognition. Reality does not constitute a check on Ideas: on the contrary, they are the norms by which reality is to be judged and guided.

In brief, there now exists an explicit theory which says what previously man had only practised. Men had formed communities by ritually instilling in each other shared notions, endowed with a pervasive, insistent and authoritative moral loading. These notions governed-in large measure-men's conduct. Thereby they made both social coexistence and communication possible.

Overt Platonism now does all this with a new and significant twist: it turns it into an explicit doctrine. For the first time, so to speak, man not merely speaks prose, but knows that he is doing so. He knows that he is thinking in terms of concepts. And secondly, the authority of these norms-concepts is universalized. When it had been merely a practice, unhallowed by theory or self-consciousness, the authority of the concepts remained socially bounded. It could not transcend the limits of the region within which the rituals which instilled the concepts were practised. Now, the allegedly authoritative conceptual compulsion becomes, or in any case claims to be, universal, trans-ethnic, trans-social, trans-communal: it becomes Reason.

Cultures had always consisted of systems of concepts, which contained their own suggestiveness, anticipations, imperatives. Societies instilled those in their members by ritual and otherwise, thereby engendering cohesion and making communication possible. Concepts had always been confirmed by stories within which they figured. Now they were also confirmed by well-articulated doctrine, their moral suggestiveness codified in formal works, their premisses supposedly proven and made logically binding. The actual Platonism of Greek history, through its doctrine of the divine status and moral authority of the concept, unwittingly lays bare the mechanisms of traditional cultures. The Transcendent is formalized and endowed with a metaphysical charter, and made to underwrite culture and its obligations. But by making all this into a doctrine, it creates a new situation altogether.