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The Lion's Roar

The Official Student News Media of Southeastern Louisiana University

The Lion's Roar

The Official Student News Media of Southeastern Louisiana University

The Lion's Roar

    Rossano connects Plato to the modern world

    Dr. Rossano with his new book

    Dr. Matt Rossano recently published “Seeking Perfection: A Dialogue about the Mind, the Soul and What It Means to Be Human.”
    The novel is a series of dialogues with the character Paulo, who is Plato in modern time, about concepts of the modern world.
    Courtesy of Public Information

    Psychology professor Dr. Matt Rossano bridges the gap between modern society and the ancient world of Greece through the eyes of Plato, renamed in the novel as Paulo, in “Seeking Perfection: A Dialogue about the Mind, the Soul and What It Means to Be Human.”

    Rossano incorporated key concepts and what philosopher Plato would think if he was in the world today. The novel is a narrative dialogue that begins with Paulo, the character resembling Plato in modern times, returning from Sicily on a boat after his failure to teach the philosopher king.

    “I always wondered what Plato might have been thinking on his last journey back from his terrible misadventure in Sicily when he was trying to train the philosopher king and what a disaster that was,” said Rossano. “That was just the starting point for it. I later mixed in my interests of comparative psychology, science and religion.” 

    Plato’s philosophies were mainly centered around idealism. He felt humans should strive to achieve certain ideals in personal life, political life and the community. Rossano wanted to compare this philosophy of idealism to modern society, seeing what Plato would think about certain debates in the world today.

    The novel involved two main concepts that were brought into dialogue between Paulo and various characters. These concepts included the growth of radical secularism and religious fundamentalism and the narrowing gap between the human and animal mind.

    To highlight the first concept, the growth of radical secularism and religious fundamentalism, Rossano wrote the philosopher king, known as Prince Dominic in the novel, as a radical secularist. 

    “Secularism is the rejection of religion,” said Rossano. “Religion does not make up the fundamental fabric of society, doesn’t mean it’s bad or outlawed. It means in order for people of different ideas and faith to get along, when they interact socially, they put those ideas and faith aside. It doesn’t necessarily say you can’t have religion, but a private-ness is involved.”

    Even though secularism allows the expression of religion without it being a dominating factor in society, radical secularism does not permit any religion to have any part in society.

    Paulo challenges Prince Dominic’s ideas involving society living by a rational code that completely eliminates any ideas of transcendence of religion or supernaturalism. 

    Rossano also re-envisioned the historical trial of Socrates, Plato’s mentor, to explore religious fundamentalism, the other extreme of radical secularism, which is when a certain religion is the main factor that is organizing society.

    Rossano, through his character Paulo, creates a balance between these two factors, showing how either extreme can have consequences.

    “What my main character is doing, what Plato is doing, is challenging these extremes and saying either one of those extremes is going to have some real problems,” said Rossano. “There must be some kind of middle ground here where we can respect various different ideas.”

    The other concept explored by Paulo was human uniqueness, the narrowing gap between the human and animal mind. 

    “If you dial back to Plato’s time, it was clear to all of them that humans were qualitatively different from animals,” said Rossano. “We were just a completely different thing. We have a spirit, a soul, rationality. We have morality and language. We have all of these things, just a completely different category of things. It really was only in the past century or two, that we were able to do a lot of comparative research in laboratories and do a lot of studies looking at language. Can you teach language to animals? Is there a moral system that animals seem to be following? You can start to study this in a more scientific way. A lot of those differences that were so obvious centuries ago are getting blurred. That’s what I mean by the narrowing between the human mind and animal mind. There is a language capacity in some other creatures and the basic primitive morals present.”

    In the novel, Paulo questions what the difference between the human mind and animal mind might be, even though they might be more subtle and complicated. Those differences might be important and can inform people about themselves.

    Like Paulo, Rossano shares the same idealist perspective, which was one of the qualities he liked most about the philosopher.

    “In general, I tend to be an idealist along with him [Plato],” said Rossano. “Even if objectively you can’t show there is some kind perfect beauty or perfect justice out there. It’s ennobling; it makes us nobler to try to envision some sort of perfection and pursue it. I think we get better when we do that. As I point out in the book, I think a lot of really positive changes have occurred because of a lot of idealist thinking people. Martin Luther King is a great example of someone who had an vision of an ideal society and was able to articulate that in an aspiring way.”

    Seeking Perfection: A Dialogue about the Mind, the Soul and What It Means to Be Human” is now available for purchase and can be found through Transaction Publishers.

    “I hope that it gets people thinking about what concepts such as justice, goodness, beauty, virtue, etcetera, really mean and how pursuing such ideals might improve the quality of human life and human relationships,” said Rossano.

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