Nick A:
Obviously F4 and I see things differently. I will post a site which will if nothing else help to clarify my position and if true why it should be an essential part of education.
The primary difference in the way we see things is that I read and reference Plato you rely on second and third hand accounts. Uebersax’s interest is Christian Platonism and Neoplatonism. Note that when explaining noesis, for example, he refers to Pauline metanoia or Plotinian epistrophe, not Plato. In my opinion a philosopher should be interpreted on his own terms not of those he knew nothing of and could not address.
The Republic is mainly an ethical and psychological work.
It is ethical in that it begins with and addresses the question of justice. It is psychological in the etymological sense of the term - it deals with the well ordered psyche or soul.
… any interest Plato may have had within the work in actual civil government is secondary and subordinate to his psychological and ethical interests.
It is quite clear that this “city in speech” is not intended to be the model for an actual city, but this does not mean that political life, that is, our public or shared life is secondary.
… the ideal City-State is presented as a conceptual tool that enables us to better understand our own inner, psychic life.
It is not simply that the city is, as Socrates says, “the soul writ large”. The Republic addresses the relationship between the soul and the city. It is thus fundamentally a political work. Uebersax touches on this in #2 but confuses what was for Plato a political problem with contemporary psychological theory.
In #3 he says:
Plato's aim in the Republic — identical with his and Socrates' overall project — is to instruct us how to achieve a well-governed, harmonious psyche by means of philosophia, the love of Wisdom.
He seems to be uninformed of the political dimension of the work. The tension between the city and philosophy is made clear by Socrates trial. This is a tension that can only be resolved if the philosopher is king. It is only when the philosopher is king that the city can be just.
NA:
Plato’s Republic is then a description of our inner lives and what is necessary with the help of noesis to allow us to live both individually and collectively worthy of the name “human.”
You slip in “with the help of noesis”, but there is no noesis of the Forms and without knowledge of the Forms and the Good the connection between ethics and epistemology fails. Noesis, according to the divided line, in not as Uebersax has it, the mental seeing of principles in the sense of rules or what we hold to be true or correct but of the Forms, justice itself, beauty itself, the good itself.
Is it possible to consciously evolve from egoism in the vertical direction of higher knowledge?”
If by higher knowledge you mean knowledge of the Forms, you are asking the wrong question. There can be no knowledge of the Forms if they do not exist, if they are, as they evidently are for Plato, products of the imagination or hypothesis.
Why do you think it is a vital distinction to distinguish between noesis and diatonia?
I assume you mean dianoia not diatonia. A key difference, one that Uebersax does not addres, is that dianoia operates by relating one thing to another. The Latin translation is ratio. As I mentioned above, the Forms are singular. They cannot be thought because they are not relations. They can be known only directly by immediate apprehension. I disagree with Peters. It has nothing to do with Conscience. (See below).
To begin, we are probably on solid ground to suggest that the Divided Line is principally concerned with moral epistemology …
This is simply wrong. There is no textual evidence to support this. From the Republic:
"Therefore, say that not only being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the good, but also existence and being are in them besides as a result of it, although the good isn't being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power." (509b)
The good is not a moral designation, it is generative of what is and what can be known.
The text continues:
Well, then," I said, "conceive that, as we say, these two things are [sun and good], and that the one is king of the intelligible class and region, while the other is king of the visible …”
"Then, take a line cut in two unequal segments, one for the class that is seen, the other for the class that is intellected—and go on and
cut each segment in the same ratio …”
“… you'll have one segment in the visible part for images. I mean by images first shadows, then appearances produced in water and in all close-grained, smooth, bright things, and everything of the sort …”
"Then in the other segment put that of which this first is the likeness—the animals around us, and everything that grows, and the
whole class of artifacts.”
"And would you also be willing," I said, "to say that with respect to truth or lack of it, as the opinable is distinguished from the knowable, so the likeness is distinguished from that of which it is the likeness?"
“[the intelligible realm is divided like this] in one part of it a soul, using as images the things that were previously imitated, is compelled to investigate on the basis of hypotheses and makes its way not to a beginning but to an end; while in the other part it makes its way to a beginning that is free from hypotheses; starting out from hypothesis and without the images used in the other part, by means of forms themselves it makes its inquiry through them." (509d-510b)
There is no talk here of moral epistemology or conscience. It is simply inquiry driven by the desire to know. Note the importance of images throughout the whole of the divided line.
Uebersax/Peters:
It's more plausible to see these as examples drawn from a fairly explicit domain (mathematics) to illustrate corresponding aspects of a less clear one (moral experience).
What may seem plausible and what we are told in the text are not the same:
"Let's try again," I said. "You'll understand more easily after this introduction. I suppose you know that the men who work in geometry,
calculation, and the like treat as known the odd and the even, the figures, three forms of angles, and other things akin to these in each
kind of inquiry. These things they make hypotheses and don't think it worthwhile to give any further account of them to themselves or others, as though they were clear to all. Beginning from them, they go ahead with their exposition of what remains and end consistently at the object toward which their investigation was directed." "Most certainly, I know that," he said. "Don't you also know that they use visible forms besides and make their arguments about them, not thinking about them but about those others that they are like? They make the arguments for the sake of the square itself and the diagonal itself, not for the sake of the diagonal they draw, and likewise with the rest. These things themselves that they mold and draw, of which there are shadows and images in water, they now use as images, seeking to see those things themselves, that one can see in no other way than with thought." "What you say is true," he said. "Well, then, this is the form I said was intelligible. However, a soul in investigating it is compelled to use hypotheses, and does not go to a beginning because it is unable to step out above the hypotheses. And it uses as images those very things of which images are made by the things below, and in comparison with which they are opined to be clear and are given honor." "I understand," he said, "that you mean what falls under geometry and its kindred arts." "Well, then, go on to understand that by the other segment of the intelligible I mean that which argument itself grasps with the power of dialectic, making the hypotheses not beginnings but really hypotheses—that is, steppingstones and springboards—in order to reach what is free from hypothesis at the beginning of the whole. When it has grasped this, argument now depends on that which depends on this beginning and in such fashion goes back down again to an end; making no use of anything sensed in any way, but using forms themselves, going through forms to forms, it ends in forms too." (510c -511c).
The mathematicians use images (he refers to them here as visible forms) as a way of thinking about those things they are images of - the image of a square to think about the square, for example. But the mathematician is not able to grasp the thing itself, the square itself. They are not able to move past thinking, dianoia, of relating one thing to another. They are not able to “reach what is free from hypothesis at the beginning of the whole”.
The divided line is principally concerned with the beginning and end of whole, the arche and telos.
Uebersax/Peters:
If we accept this view then what Plato seems to be saying in the Divided Line is that there is a special form of knowledge, noesis, which is a much better basis for guiding our thoughts and actions than other, lesser forms of knowledge.
Peter’s view or Uebersax’s is not Plato’s. Noesis is a special kind of knowledge, but not one we have access to. We do not know the arche and telos of the whole. Like the mathematicians we cannot move beyond the images and hypothesis we rely on. But unlike the mathematics the questions of justice, beauty, and the good are not things that yield to mathematical demonstration.