November 1, 2005
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Antidote to Atiyah
In a recent talk, “The Nature of Space,” Sir Michael Atiyah
gave a misleading description of Plato’s doctrine of “ideas,” or
“idealism.” Atiyah said that according to Plato, ideas reside
in “an imaginary world– the world of the mind,” and that
what we see in the external world is “some pale reflection” of ideas in
the mind.An antidote to Atiyah’s nonsense may be found in the Catholic Encyclopedia:
“So it came to pass that the word idea in various languages
took on more and more the meaning of ‘representation,’ ‘mental image,’
and the like. Hence too, there was gradually introduced the terminology
which we find in the writings of Berkeley, and according to which
idealism is the doctrine that ascribes reality to our ideas, i.e. our
representations, but denies the reality of the physical world. This
sort of idealism is just the reverse of that which was held by the
philosophers of antiquity and their Christian
successors; it does away with the reality of ideal principles by
confining them exclusively to the thinking subject; it is a spurious
idealism….”Atiyah contrasts his mistaken view of Plato with what he calls the
“realism” of Hume. He does not mention that Plato’s doctrine of
ideas is also known as “realism.” For details, see, again, the Catholic Encyclopedia:“The conciliation of the one and the many, the changing and the
permanent, was a favourite problem with the Greeks; it leads to the
problem of universals. The typical affirmation of Exaggerated Realism, the most outspoken ever made, appears in Plato’s philosophy;
the real must possess the attributes of necessity, universality, unity,
and immutability which are found in our intellectual representations.
And as the sensible world contains only the contingent, the particular,
the unstable, it follows that the real exists outside and above the
sensible world. Plato calls it eîdos, idea. The idea is absolutely stable and exists by itself (ontos on; auta kath’ auta),
isolated from the phenomenal world, distinct from the Divine and human
intellect…. The
exaggerated Realism of Plato… is the principal doctrine of his
metaphysics.”
Atiyah’s misleading remarks may appeal to believers in the contemptible
religion of Scientism, but they have little to do with either historical reality or authentic philosophy.
