David Sedley, 'The Ideal of Godlikeness', from Plato2 edited by Gail Fine.

• In antiquity, the goal of Platonic philosophy was "becoming like god"
• Sedley thinks that despite the lack of attention to this goal, it was the goal, and we risk misinterpreting Plato if we don't pay attention to it.
• It is in keeping with Pythagorean belief in progress of the soul thru successive stages/lives leading to recovery of original divinity
• But Plato's goal is phrased with "insofar as possible" added to 'becoming like god'
• Symposium may be the first place this goal is found
• our life is presented as a series of stages and the unity of one life is artificial
• procreation extends the patchwork that is life and the quest for eudaimonia
• pursuit of fame is a better way to pursue extension of eudaimonia
• legislation to spread eudaimonia is even better
• fear of death is changed into a constant striving for a higher ideal
• Plato is also, perhaps later, convinced of the immortality of the soul
• so how does that fit with the pursuit of immortality within one life in Symposium?
• In Timaeus, a well lived life earning immortality will appear again, but transformed
• Theaetetus is the locus classicus for the idea of godlikeness, because it has the phrase that means 'godlikeness' explicitly stated
  
• written after development of theory of forms and tripartite soul
• seems to be clearing the way for Forms but also showing continuity with Socrates
• Socrates as the 'midwife' of Platonism.
• he tests and rejects empiricism, materialism, and relativism of Presocratics
• After he has rejected relativism about expertise and relativism itself, he is left with the possibility that relativism is correct about values such as just, lawful, or beautiful or holy.
• 172b-177c is Socrates' effort to refute that idea, to claim objective standards for such values
• My friend, there are standards (paradeigmata) set up in reality. The divine standard is supremely happy, the godless one is supremely wretched. Because they don't see that this is so, their folly and extreme stupidity blind them to the fact that their unjust behavior is making them become like the one standard and unlike the other. The penalty they pay for this is to lead a life resembling the standard which they are making themselves become like.
• 176e-177a
• The paradeigmata identified here are not Forms, as 176a5-c3 make clear:
• But it is not possible for evils to be eliminated, Theodorus--there must always be some opposite to good--nor can evils be established among the gods. Of necessity it is mortal nature and our vicinity that are haunted by evils. And that is why we should also try to escape from here to there as quickly as we can. To escape is to become like god so far as is possible  and to become like god is to become just and holy, together with wisdom. The trouble is, my friend, that it is not all that easy to persuade anyone that the reason why most people think we should escape wickedness and pursue goodness, namely so as to seem not wicked by good, is not the real reason, It's just an old wives' tale, I'd say. Let's put the true reason as follows. God is not at all in any respect unjust, but as just as can be; and there is nothing more like him than any one of us who becomes in his own turn as just as possible.
• The implication is that Socrates, without Forms, could escape moral relativism and be a moral realist via his religious convictions
• The lists of virtues we find include holiness as one of five in the "early dialogues," but with the Meno and other middle dialogues holiness drops out of the lists. Holiness does not feature in Republic.
• SO the reappearance of holiness here is interesting.
• To narrow your distance from god, become just and holy is what the Tht digression means.
• The early dialogues seem to say that all the virtues are one state of mind, one unity, and holiness is part of it. It is service to god, who is entirely good, and so to be holy is to be good. Serving god just is being just, wise, courageous, and temperate: holiness is just that seen vis-a-vis god.
• God is the one perfect paradigm or examplar of goodness.
• Other dialogues
• In Republic, at the end, it says that happiness will come as a gift from gods for living a good life.
• It seems disappointing, philosophically, that happiness will be given by god to a good person.
• But Smp has much the same idea at 212a, that 'it is proper to one  who has born and nurtured true virtue to become dear to the gods, and for him too, if any human being does, to become immortal."
• Apology  ends on a similar note.
• So does Aristotle's account of contemplative happiness in EN 10.8.
• Phaedrus 252c-253c invokes the assimilation to god idea as assimilation to particular gods: there are 11 different, possibly incompatible ideals of character there.
• Polytheistic!
• but each god has a firm grasp of moral Forms.
• so there are many ways of being good: he is harnessing polytheism for persuasive ends to suggest a sort of moral pluralism
• Republic's metaphysics, seen in 600b8-d3 say that the aim or morality should be to embody the Forms of justice, beauty, ... and above all the Good itself.
• But for this, reverence is a nice tool, and not the only one: interestingly, god need not even objectively exist for this to work.
  
• Timaeus
• Plato's effort to argue/explain how the world is the product of divine intelligence.
• It is no accident that humans can pattern themselves after a divine soul: it simply reflects the nature of the soul, it's origin, and the teleology of the whole world.
• The divine creator wanted the world to be as much like himself as possible (intelligence imbues the world) 29e
• to make the world soul, the creator used sameness, difference, and being (the very stuff of rational thought), and then used the leftovers to form the human soul!
• the patterns in the heavens are visible manifestations thru which we learn mathematics 39b
• our eyes' primary purpose is to study the heavens, for that reason ...
  
• by learning the math, we can instantiate divine thought within our own heads and think like god
• the rectilinearity of sense perception disrupts the naturally circular motions of rationality 43a ff.
• infants gradually reestablish the circular rational motions after initially being hit by rectilinearity of sense perceptions
• HOW TO REACT TO THIS?
• Sedley suggests that some de-literalization is in order: no one thinks there is a literal mixing bowl, but the circularity of thought doesn't seem to be mythological
• celestial movements ARE the movements of the world soul made visible 47b
• somehow the creator planted in the incorporal movements of the world soul its own heavenly body (38-39) which made the movements visible.
• so it seems that the incorporeal can have spatial extent, but it lacks the corporeal tangibility and visibility (what does that mean?)
• human rational thought is clearly circular (86e-87a)
• bodily motions and mis-mixing of humors can interfere with the circular rational movements
• the head is rational partly in order to make it able to entertain rational thought, which needs a round container to work.
• 76a explains that how our skull bones come together on top of our head is a reflection of the revolutions of thought!
• there simply is not as profound a gap between incorporeal and corporeal as people think there is, for Plato at least.
• the tripartite soul is retained, but the irrational parts are below the neck!
• imbalances between soul and body are to be addressed by physical training!
• the 3 parts of the soul must each have its own appropriate movements
• We have frequently remarked that there are three kinds of soul triply housed in us. So too now, along the same lines, we must say as briefly as possible that any of these soul parts which spends its time in idleness and relaxes its own motions must necessarily grow extremely weak, while any that is exercised becomes extremely strong. For this reason we must take care that they have their motions proportionate to each other.
• Timaeus 89e-90a
• That's why the guardians have a rigorous physical training!
• 90a-d has a whole huge thing about intellectual virtues! this is another locus classicus for "becoming like god."
• the rational part is temporarily in the body, in the head:
• Concerning themost authoritative kind of soul found in us, we mjust have the following thought. God has given it to each of us as a daimon--this thing which we say dwells in the topmost part of our body and raised us up from the earth towards what is akin to us in the heaven, because we rightly call ourselves a heavenly plant, not an earthly one. For the divinity keeps our body upright by suspending our head and root from the place out of which our soul was first born.
• Timaeus 90a-b
• happiness, eudaimonia, consists in taking care of that daimon, rational thought
• humans are a mix of mortal and immortal parts:
• if you concentrate on your mortal part, you make yourself mortal.
• if you concentrate on your immortal (rational) part, then, in sofar as possible, you make yourself godlike, immortal.
• and astronomy and math is the best way to do that!
• FOUR POINTS
• 1. becoming godlike is a return of the soul to its original nature.
• 2. it is easy to see how Platonism thought that becoming godlike is THE goal of the best life.
• this is goal not as in terminus but as in supreme fulfillment
• 3. 'insofar as possible': what are the limits?
• turns out that we shouldn't build labs and try to be like god that way:
• But if someone were to investigate this with a practical test, they would be ignorant of the difference between human and divine nature For god has sufficient knowledge and power to mix multiplicity into unity and to dissolve unity back into multipliciy; but no human being either is or ever will be capable of either of these things.
• Timaeus 68d
• 4. So what does it look/feel like? What cognitive state is achieved by being godlike?
• Xenocrates, a Platonist, held that it was being moral, like the world-soul which is the governing principle and concerns itself with the whole universe's good, a providential principle. This is in keeping with what THT 176b asserted: to be godlike is to be achieve moral virtue.
• Plotinus, much later, thought that assimilation to god is to achieve a purely intellectual thing: moral virtues are sorta virtues, political expedients. True virtue is the release of soul from body ito the intellectual realm.
• This is in keeping with Rep. 518d-e, once the soul is released from the cave: 'Hence the other so-called virtues of the soul look likely to be close to those of the body--for actually when we do not at first have them we seem to acquire them by habvit and practice--whereas the virtue of wisdom really odes prove to belong, it seems, to something more divine.'
• The Timaeus too seems to favor the intellectual virtues over the moral virtues.
• A problem is that the world-soul has a strong practical reasoning component: it is what keeps the universe good. But nonetheless, by concentrating on becoming, we distort the naturally circular rational motions of the soul which are concerned with being. I.e. the world-soul can do it/has to do it, but it's not the goal.
• Aristotle
• Aristotle in NE spent most of the time on moral virtue, but at the end, he downgraded that in favor of intellectual virtue, contemplation.
• We contemplate happens in us by means of a divine part of us, the intellect.
• And only when we contemplate do we resemble god.
• The gods have no need of moral virtues: they only need intellectual ones! Perhaps Aristotle was reading Timaeus 90?
• Sure, the world soul is entangled in administering the world of becoming, but Plato is recommending that we emulate not the administrator, but the purely intellectual.
• Perhaps Aristotle was asking why a god would need to be forced to administer, and so came up with a purely intellectual god.
• THe way that Aristotle's god moves the entire world is in virtue of the fact that the entire world is striving to become like him: absolute goodness has great motivational force
• stars do so by eternal rotation
• humans by occasional contemplation
• life does it by reproduction
• primary elements by 'intertransformations'
• Aristotle uses a phrase with no shared words but the same meaning as "becoming godlike insofar as possible" for his description of contempation as the highest human flourishing.
• this intermittent contemplation activity, however, makes us godlike, but not in imortality
• but the intellect is the one immortal part of us, in Aristotle's view.
• The Timaeus gives the physical basis of flourishing, while the Tht gives the epistemological basis, and the Republic gives the ethical basis, as Eudorus, who is a source for Stobaeus 2.49.18-22, says.
• Timaeus does have the 'physics' of what is said in other terms elsewhere in Plato:
• falsity 43e ff
• embodiment of Forms 51bff
• vice 86b
• happiness 90
• the godlike contemplator in Timaeus is like the person freed of the cave in Rep.