Plato

The problem left by Socrates was whether the concepts he was discussing—bravery, goodness, friendship, beauty among them—could ever be defined to the satisfaction of all. This challenge was taken up by his admirer Plato (429-347). Plato’s background was aristocratic. It is unfair to suggest that this alone conditioned his philosophy, but he remained thoroughly unconvinced by his experience of democracy, especially as in his youth democratic rule was associated with the humiliation of his native Athens at the hands of Sparta. The trial of Socrates appears to have marked a turning point for him. Democracy for Plato was synonymous with mob rule, with decisions taken for purely emotional or mercenary motives. Furthermore, the practice of democracy implied that moral and political values were relative, subject to the atmosphere of the moment. Plato was convinced that a better foundation could be found for knowledge if absolutes, of justice and goodness, for instance, could be established, against which any specific policy could be judged. The problem lay in defining where these absolutes might exist and how they could be approached by the human mind. (See David Melling, Understanding Plato, Oxford and New York, 1987, as an introduction.)

A solution is explored in a famous passage in a ‘Middle’ Dialogue, Meno, where Socrates guides a slave boy, a symbol of someone with no formal learning, through a geometrical proof concerning the area of a square (a proof to show that when the length of a square’s sides are doubled it quadruples in area). The slave is led inexorably onwards by Socrates through the argument towards an inevitable conclusion. The point Socrates/Plato wants to make is that the truths about the area of the square exist eternally. Each soul (Plato believed that the soul existed eternally) in fact once knew them, and the process which the slave boy has been taken through is primarily one of recollection of what has been forgotten.

Plato goes on to argue that it is not only mathematical proofs that exist to be ‘recollected’ in this way. Many other concepts—beauty, bravery, goodness, for instance—exist as eternal entities available to be comprehended through reason. The term Plato uses is normally translated as Form or Idea—the Form of Beauty or

Bravery, for instance. Each Form can only be grasped after a long period of reflection on its nature (going through a process such as Socrates followed, meditating on every aspect of the Form chosen until its essence is defined). The Forms exist as a hierarchy, with some easier to grasp than others and with the Form of ‘the good’ at the apex. In his famous analogy of the prisoners in the cave (from The Republic), Plato has his freed prisoners first being able to see reflections of objects in water, then the objects themselves, then the stars, and finally the sun (‘the good’) as they progress in the use of rational thought.

The goal of the philosopher is, therefore, to understand the Forms. As the Forms are entities that exist completely independently of the human mind, they are in fact an enduring ‘reality’ in contrast to the transient world perceived by the senses; those few who do understand them correctly must agree on what they consist of. The Form of ‘the good’ will mean exactly the same to all those whose reason penetrates its meaning. Plato has moved on from Socrates’ view that the goal of life is self-discovery. The Forms exist beyond the individual, and any knowledge an individual thinks he has which does not conform to a Form is by definition flawed. (‘We shall approach astronomy, as we do geometry, by way of problems, and ignore what is in the sky [my italics], if we are to get a real grasp of astronomy,’ Plato wrote in The Republic.)

There are many questions about the Forms that Plato leaves unresolved. This is partly because the concept is used in several different Dialogues, in a variety of contexts and to deal with different problems. Most of the Forms Plato mentions are ‘good’ ones, Beauty, Courage, and so on. He does not state whether there are Forms of Ugliness, Cowardice, and Evil. (In his so-called Seventh Letter Plato suggests that there might be Forms ‘of shapes and surfaces, of the good, the beautiful, the just, of all bodies natural and artificial, of fire and water and the like, of every animal, of every quality of character, of all actions and passivities.’) Nor is it clear whether there can be Forms of physical objects, such as beds or tables. Can there be a perfect table that contains the features of all other tables in some ideal form? Some concepts are difficult to imagine as Forms, Largeness, for instance. Could a Form of Largeness be anything more than something of infinite size? Some scholars even argue that Plato came to realize that these problems were insoluble and in his later work abandoned the idea of Forms altogether. However, it is lack of dogmatism that is also one of his main attractions. In the longer dialogues such as Gorgias, the characters are given every chance to set out their opinions even if they eventually prove vulnerable to the relentless questioning of Socrates.

In the best known of his Middle Dialogues, The Republic, Plato goes on to show how understanding of the Forms can be used to construct an ideal state. He starts from the premiss that the happiness of the individual is dependent on the happiness of the polis. The individual, in other words, is seen as incapable of having true happiness in his own right but only as a member of a wider community. The purpose of the community is to embody key concepts of good government such as justice and goodness. These can only be based on an understanding of the Forms. However, since only a few individuals have the intellectual ability and leisure to grasp the Forms, government must be given to them alone. Plato is turning his back on democracy, which he famously described as like a ship without a captain, and arguing for some form of rule by an elite instead.

Where did this leave the rest of the population? Plato divided them into classes, by analogy with the concept he held of the soul. For Plato, as for Socrates, the soul was something eternal existing on a different plane from the body. It had three elements: the capacity for reason, its spirit (the force which motivated it), and appetites. (The problem of whether the soul or mind can be split in this sense, a concept central to the work of Freud, continues as a major issue in philosophy.) For anyone seeking to grasp the nature of the Forms, the power of reason should gradually come to predominate over spirit and appetite. Society could similarly be divided into men of reason, the philosophers, men of spirit, to whom was given the role of soldiers, and the rest, those, prey to their appetites, who remained at the level of labourers. In the Phaedo Plato speaks scornfully of ‘the lovers of spectacles and sounds, who delight in fine voices and colours and shapes. . . but their minds are incapable of seeing and delighting in the nature of the Beautiful itself.’

Philosophers-to-be, who could be men or women, were to be selected at an early age from those of spirit. They were first to be put through a regime of physical training and instruction in the arts to mould their character. Mathematics came next, and later a training in dialectics so that a young philosopher would be able to defend the Forms to others once he or she had grasped them. The process was a long one. Not until the age of 30 would the trainees be allowed to serve the state, and the peak of understanding of the Forms would not be reached before the age of 50.

Plato said relatively little in The Republic about the nature of the state that would finally emerge. It would appear to be joyless and authoritarian. Good government must not be swayed by emotion, so poetry and music are forbidden. Children are to be held in common. Sex life is to be limited, with an emphasis on eugenic breeding. The rulers must expect no gain from their position other than the satisfaction they obtain from establishing and enforcing truth. Politics, in the sense of debates between different power groups over the direction of the state, simply have no relevance (since once the Forms of Justice or Bravery, for instance, have been grasped there can be no further argument about their nature).

Plato’s republic was an ideal. It seemed very far from any possible actual state, as Plato found to his cost on the only occasion he intervened in politics. He had travelled to Sicily about 388, possibly to learn more about Pythagoras from the Pythagorean communities that still existed in southern Italy. (The idea of a philosophical community fascinated Plato and inspired his own Academy in Athens.) He had met and was deeply attracted to Dion, the brother-in-law of the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius. Dion absorbed Plato’s philosophy, and some twenty years later when Dionysius’ son, Dionysius II, succeeded as ruler as a young man, Dion plotted to mould him into a philosopher king on the Platonic model. Plato, now in his sixties, returned to Sicily, but Dionysius was not prepared to play along with his ideals and both Dion and Plato were forced to flee. In one of his last works, The Laws, Plato finally sets out a constitution. Many of its requirements are severe: strict chastity, constant supervision of children, a ban on all homosexuality. It reflects Plato’s continuing pessimism about human nature, one doubtless reinforced by his experiences in Sicily. Yet the art of politics remained at the core of Plato’s teachings. He played very little part in Athenian politics but many of his followers were called on as consultants by other city-states.

Western philosophy, wrote the mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead, ‘consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’. Certainly Plato’s legacy is a profound one. His later biographers talked of him as ‘a teacher of divine wisdom’, even that he was honoured among the gods after his death (some myths suggest that he was divinely conceived!). All those who believe that there is a reality beyond the physical world that embodies value, a view which entered Christianity via the Neoplatonists and St Augustine (see pp. 598 and 623), fall within the Platonic tradition. Those who do not see any evidence of such a reality fall outside it. It is a crucial divide and it also mirrors the divide between those who accept the possibility of moral absolutes and those who do not.

The legacy of Plato in Christian theology has been especially important. As will be seen, Platonism remained the most influential philosophy in the early Christian centuries and was there at hand as Christian theology developed. Once truths about the Christian faith were consolidated in the fourth century they were assumed to be, like Plato’s Forms, unchallengeable. Plato’s theory of the soul in which the reasoning part of the soul was under continual threat from the more sensual parts underpinned asceticism and even opulent church building was justified on the grounds that it gave an image on earth of what ‘true’ beauty might be in the world beyond.

The legacy of Plato so far as political thought is concerned is, inevitably, controversial, ‘What is our ultimate aim? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of eternal justice, whose laws are engraved, not in marble or stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave who forgets them [compare Meno] and of the tyrant who rejects them.’ This statement appears to be set well in the Platonic tradition. It is, in fact, a speech of Maximilien Robespierre made at the height of the French Revolution, a speech which goes on to justify terror against all those who oppose the establishment of a Republic of Virtue. As Karl Popper has argued in his influential The Open Society and its Enemies, Plato represents a direct threat to the democratic tradition, and any ruling elite that claims that it has the right to impose its own ideals on society is his heir.

This is perhaps too harsh. Certainly Platonism can lead to dictatorship, but it can also lead to a critique of dictatorship. In a state where the majority support genocide in the name, for instance, of establishing racial purity, how are alternative values to be developed and justified other than through a rational understanding of abstract concepts such as justice and human rights? Are there not fundamental values that need to be preserved against the momentary enthusiasm of popular assemblies? (The US Constitution with its enshrined Bill of Rights accepts that there are.) In education, does a disciplined introduction to effective ways of thinking achieve more than one based on undirected creative thought? It would be arrogant, and naive, to believe that liberal democracy has solved all the problems of human existence, and to that extent Plato deserves his continuing influence in political and moral thought. It is also important to remember that he established a method of argument, the dialectic.

One of the enduring legacies of Plato was his Academy. It took its name from a nearby grove dedicated to a hero Academus (now replanted in a suburb of Athens), and Plato founded it after his return from his first visit to Sicily in the 380s. It was always a rather exclusive club, but was open to young men from throughout the Greek world, who, presumably, had to show some aptitude and commitment to philosophy before they were accepted as students. In 367 an 18-year-old from Stageira in Macedonia arrived to participate in the Academy’s studies. He was the son of a doctor and had probably already picked up some medical skills of observation and possibly dissection. He also appears to have had some wealth, presumably from family land, and anecdotes suggest that despite being fragile in appearance he enjoyed dressing well. His name, one of the most celebrated in the history of science and philosophy, was Aristotle. (See Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford and New York, 2001; Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, Cambridge and New York, 1988; and Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, Cambridge and New York, 1995. Geoffrey Lloyd has also written extensively about Aristotle, e. g. Aristotelian Explorations, Cambridge and New York, 1996.)