Plato (part One)

Plato I

It has been said that all philosophy is just footnotes on Plato. Whether or not that is the case he stands right at the beginning of Western philosophy, and framed some of the longest-lasting and insightful answers to perennial questions in philosophy.

Of the man we know a fair amount of biographical detail, gleanable from his writings and some external sources (as with Socrates we have the efforts of some later biographers like Diogenes Laertius who aught to be treated with caution). A friend but not an intimate of Socrates (he tells us himself that he wasn t present at his fairly well attended execution), it is clear that Plato was influenced significantly by the man, taking the Sokratikoi logoi form and running with it. But although every dialogue Plato ever wrote had Socrates as its main protagonist, in all but one notable case running dialectical circles round his interlocutors, the historical Socrates quickly fades into the background, becoming a mouthpiece for Plato s own philosophical speculations.

Ideas

Background

Though we may all be his inheritors Plato himself owes a debt, at least in terms of the questions he tackles, to a group of thinkers that came before him. Usefully lumped together under the title pre-Socratics (as in, all those before Socrates), Plato addresses the various questions and agendas set by that amorphous group of thinkers whose writings, mostly lost to us, he had access to. Though the interests of the pre-Socratics cover a vast area (Pythagoras alone, probably our best known pre-Socratic, was said to discourse on such topics as transmigration of the soul, the badness of eating fava beans, and of course mathematics), there were certain more general questions which are picked up in Plato s work: the question of the one and the many (basically, how did the world which is made up of many things, originate from one thing? Spot the glaring supposition), is there a difference between appearances and the truly real? how do we gain knowledge? etc. Into this world of speculation about the nature of reality and the beginnings of the cosmos (greek kosmos = harmonious ordering ), where thinkers had already to a large degree freed themselves from mythological answers to such questions, stepped Plato inspired by Socrates incessant desire for questioning and exploration, but with an agenda apart from his great teacher.

Cave Dwellers and Sun Seekers

Probably the best place to access the heart of Plato s philosophy is in his famous Cave allegory, because in that we come to grips with his theories of knowledge and of reality itself. The allegory, as told in Plato s Republic, goes like this:

Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

I see.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

...
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. That is certain.

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,__what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,__will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

Far truer.

So that probably needs some unpacking. Who do the players in this little scene represent? Well, we have Plato telling us that the group represents us in general, humanity. And that humanity is in a state of imprisonment. Our imprisonment though, is intellectual rather than physical. In the allegory though, one of us manages to get loose and leaves his imprisonment, seeing reality as it really is. This of course is the philosopher, and more precisely the Platonic philosopher, and his freedom consists in his obtaining true knowledge.

And so what do the shadows and the objects represent? Well, Plato is here positing (putting forward, suggesting the existence of) a fundamental split in reality. He is telling us that there are in essence two worlds: the world of appearance and the world of real things, where the shadows on the wall represent simply the world as it appears to be, as it appears to us and the objects being paraded behind represent those things which exist in the real world. So the world which is presented to us by our senses, the world we see, hear, touch etc. is not truly real , it is like a world of shadows.

The reason Plato wants to posit this fundamental split and doubt the reality of this world is the fact of change. Everything in this world changes so that what is hot becomes cold, what is young gets old, a thing s colour may change or its size, shape etc. and so nothing ever really is one thing or another. In more philosophical language nothing in this world ever becomes (that is actually finishes its journey to being something), but everything is becoming (unfinished, changing). True existence, so says Plato, can only be ascribed to things that actually are, not to things that haven t yet achieved that. So there must be some place, somewhere, where there are things that have become, that have true reality.

This world is what is represented by the objects which cast the shadows onto the cave wall - this is the world of the Forms.

The Theory of Forms

The word which we translate as forms is the Greek word eidos, from which we get the English word idea which can also stand as a good translation. It is the word Plato uses to describe the objects/entities that truly exist. As the analogy of the Cave shows these Forms play an important role in shaping the world that we experience, the world of appearance. In fact they are the shaping elements of our reality, as all things are simply the shadows of the Forms. Our world is a reflection of what exists in that world of true reality. Pretty deep, eh?

But what exactly is an eidos/Form? Well simply, a Form is the embodiment and source of a quality. An example is needed. There are many things in the world which are red, apples, blood, post-boxes. Even though there are different shades of red we can each point to instances of it and say there is one thing common to all red things, that is, the quality of redness. But what is redness, where does it exist? We recognize that there is this thing which exists, the colour red, and all red things share in it but in an unstable and changing way (apples rot and turn brown, post-boxes gradually lose their redness). But the quality of redness doesn t fade over time. No matter how many red things become not-red redness still exists. But where? Plato s answer is that the Form of redness always exists, unchanging, and that every red thing here in appearance world is red because it shares in some of the nature of the Form of red. And as well as the Form of red, there are Forms for every quality which a thing can have. There is a Form of large, of small, of rough, or round there must even be a Form for things like beds and chairs, as there are many instances of these things yet we call them all by the same name, and so there must be a Form which we recognize in each individual instance of a bed or a chair or a door, and so call it after its Form.

So that is the idea. This world of appearance is like clay and the Forms shape the clay to look like themselves. The Forms don t change, there is always the Form of large, of chairs, of red/yellow/pink and blue, but their manifestations in our world come and go. So the theory of Forms is an attempt to understand the nature of change and the need for something unchanging.

The Beautiful and the Good

That is the groundwork to Plato s theory of Forms, but it hardly needs to be said that, if all he d talked about was beds and red and big he may not have been reckoned one of the worlds greatest philosophers. Where Plato s philosophy really takes of is when he considers the higher qualities of this world, things like the Beautiful and the Good (when talking about Platonic philosophy we use the capital letter to indicate we are talking about the Form of something, e.g. Beauty, Good, Red).

There are in this world of change many things which we call beautiful, a sunrise, a rose, a beautiful man or woman. And if what we have been saying about other qualities is true then there must be some unchangeable thing which links all beautiful things together, there must be some perfect embodiment of this quality of beauty, the Form of beauty. And according to the theory all beautiful things are beautiful because they share in some measure of the nature of the perfect source, Beauty in itself.

This is better than the philosophy of apples and furniture.

If these things exist though, how can we know them, how can we experience them for ourselves? Plato, through the mouth of a lady called Diotima, explains in a dialogue called The Symposium:

The man who would pursue the right way to this goal must begin, when he is young, by applying himself to the contemplation of physical beauty, and... he will first fall in with one particular beautiful person and beget noble sentiments in partnership with him. Later he will observe that physical beauty in any person is closely akin to physical beauty in any other...The next stage is for him to reckon beauty of soul more valuable than beauty of body...

Then after seeking the beauty not just in people but in institutions and activities and in other things he will begin to see that all beauty is alike until:

at last, strengthened and increased in stature by this experience...he will see it as absolute, existing alone within itself, unique, eternal and all other beautiful things as taking part of it...

One who wishes to see the Forms must first contemplate individual instances of its nature. Then, coming to perceive that which is common to all and the purest examples of it, will contemplate the Form itself. Once a person has begun to understand the Forms, then they have knowledge of true reality.

And we should not devote ourselves to the perceptions of just any Forms, but most of all to the Beautiful and the Good, but especially to the Good. To return to where we started, the allegory of the Cave, we learn what is the true end of Plato s philosophy. After our prisoner has escaped from his chains and emerged from the cave and has suffered the pain of adjusting his eyesight to be able to look at the Forms, last of all he will be able to to perceive the Sun itself:

...and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another and he will contemplate him as he is.

The Sun represents the Form of the Good. For Plato, the Good is the source of all things, and like the Sun, that in virtue of which we can even perceive at all. Even the gods themselves owe their being to the Good. To gain a vision of the Good is the aim of the Platonic philosopher, and he must pursue this project in much the same way as he pursues a vision of the other Forms.

Roundup

Plato s conception of reality is vast and his estimation of the power of philosophy equally as impressive. But the amount of reworking of our estimations of the world he asks of us, may cause us to hesitate to agree too easily with him. The world around us is illusion and appearance and only the philosopher can know true reality! Strong claims indeed. It must be said though, that the theory of Forms remains one of the most poetic and expansive accounts of the world offered in the philosophical tradition, and maybe the most influential idea in philosophy to date. Whether we agree or disagree with Plato I feel we can t help but be impressed by him.

Further Reading

Penguin have published translation of most of the major dialogues of Plato, each with useful introductions linking in with the major themes in Plato s thought. Of particular interest are the dialogues found in:

- Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Penguin, 2003. As well as:

- Plato, The Symposium, Penguin, 2003. A beautiful dialogue, shows Plato as a great writer as well as a philosopher.
- Plato, Protagoras and Meno, Penguin, 2005.

But Plato s greatest work is undoubtedly the Republic which we will cover in another article.

- Plato, The Republic, Penguin, 2007. Some good explanatory works are:

- Nickolas Pappas, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic, Routledge, 2003.
- Julia Annas, A Very Short Introduction to Plato, OUP, 2003.

Though the Penguin introductions and the dialogues themselves are probably all you need to get started some more in-depth work can be found in:

- Richard Kraut (Editor), The Cambridge Companion to Plato, CUP, 1992.