plato reconsidered
by
RW FRA. Trevor Steward, UGLE
Socrates
Ancient Greece produced not
only the first but also some of the greatest philosophers. Some of the most
outstanding of the earliest of these were Thales, Pythagorus, Xenophanes and
Heraclitus. But the one who is most widely known came after these. He was
Socrates. The pre-Socratic philosophers are said to have had one common aim:
to discover the underlying, universal principles that would help us to explain
Nature completely. They were as much concerned with ‘cosmology’ as they were
with ‘philosophy’. Socrates, however, rebelled consciously against this
tendency. He claimed that what we most need to learn is not so much how Nature
functions but how we ought to live. Therefore, what we need to consider
first are moral questions.
Socrates never wrote anything
down. So far as we are able to determine now he merely taught orally. Since
none of the teachings of these early Greek philosophers have come down to us
directly, we have to rely on summaries – some of which are very full indeed and
which even contain what are claimed to be direct quotations. These have been
produced by their disciples and by some critics. This means that everything
that we have inherited from those far off days as come to us second-hand.
But the first philosopher who
wrote down his teachings in books - the texts of which we actually do possess -
was Plato (428 BC – 348 BC), one of Socrates’ pupils. In fact, it is through
Plato’s writings that we know most about Socrates. In his own right, however,
Plato is one of the very greatest of philosophers the western world has produced
and for that reason alone he merits revisiting often.
An Athenian aristocrat by
birth, Plato might have been expected to have played a part in the politics of
that city. However, he, like many other young men of those times, came under
the influence of Socrates who fired his enthusiasm for speculative thinking. He
was about 31 years of age when Socrates died and he lived for a further 50
years. During that half-century he founded a famous school, or Academy, in
Athens – the prototype of what we might call a university – and he produced a
series of remarkable texts. Nearly all of these take the form of ‘dialogues’ –
a conventional philosophic form - in which different arguments are put into the
mouths of various characters, one of whom is nearly always Socrates. Most of
them, though not all, are called after the name of the principle person with
whom Socrates is talking. Thus we have the Phaedo, the Laches,
the Euthyphro, the Theaetetus, the Parmenides, the
Timaeus etc. There are about 28 of them. Some of them are just 20 pages
long; others are 80 pages and two of them are more than 300 pages in length.
The most famous of them all, for some people, are the Symposium and the
Republic. The best of them are not only provocative works of high
philosophical content but also works of literary merit with an aesthetic form,
dramatic qualities and balanced, ‘cool’ prose.
I suppose that Plato’s career
as a philosopher might be said to have started with Socrates’ death in 399 BC.
That must have been a dramatic event for lots of people then. Socrates had been
a spell-binding presence in and around Athens for many years. He was much
loved and much hated. He was even caricatured in the Athenian comedy
theatre at a public festival in front of the whole population. Suddenly, the
familiar, somewhat physically grotesque figure was no longer there. The reason
why was that he had been condemned to death – by self-administered, fatal drink
of hemlock – on the trumped-up charge of impiety and of corrupting the youth of
the city state. The actual cause and the manner of his untimely death may have
been even more distressing for his supporters than the death itself. He had had
many devoted disciples. Some of them, including Plato, began writing ‘Socratic’
dialogues, or philosophical ‘conversations’ in which Socrates took the leading
role. It must have seemed, for a time at any rate, that there was a veritable
chorus of voices claiming to the Athenians:
Look! He has not gone after
all. He is still here, still asking those awkward questions; still tripping
you up with his arguments!
And, of course, these
'Socratic' dialogues defended his reputation. They were attempting to show that
Socrates had been unjustly condemned to death; that he was the great teacher of
the youth of the day and not a corrupter of them.
Plato’s Early ‘Dialogues’
Socrates’ death was not just an
emotional experience that got Plato started with his philosophical writings and
then was put behind him safely later on. In a sense all of his career
can be explained with reference to Socrates. Keeping the spirit of his teacher
alive meant for Plato going on doing philosophy very much in the same way.
He gave up all thought of any
political career, left Athens in disgust at that city’s ill-treatment of his
beloved master and is said to have travelled widely throughout the then known
world, even to fabled Egypt to learn there from their sages. However, we do not
have any really reliable biographical information about him at that stage of his
long life. After his first visit to Italy and Sicily in 387 BC, he returned to
Athens and there he founded what was to become a famous school for the formal
education of young men in philosophical thinking.
The first result of Plato’s
intention to represent his Socratic inheritance was a group of early
‘dialogues’, the most important of which are the Apology, the Crito,
the Euthypho, the Laches, the Charmides, the Protagoras
and the Gorgias. These depict Socrates discussing all sorts of question
in which he was interested. They were mostly moral questions. However, since
to do philosophy Socratically means to do it philosophically, the process
leads gradually to Plato developing his own ideas in ethics and other areas of
philosophy. Therefore, there is a slow evolution of the picture of Socrates
that we derive from these ‘dialogues’. From the gadfly questioner of the early
‘dialogues’, he appears to change into someone who expounds some very profound
theories in politics, metaphysics and philosophical methodology. That is the
persona of Socrates as he evolves in the so-called ‘middle-period
dialogues’.
In other words, in his early
‘Socratic dialogues’, Plato deals with those subjects which interested his
teacher, Socrates, and he deals with them in Socrates’ way. Very often
he puts into Socrates’ mouth what he actually knew to have been Socrates’
opinions. As the years go by, however, the momentum of his task carries him on
into dealing with other subjects that interest him. He deals with these
in his own ways; he expresses his own opinions but still mostly as though
they were coming from Socrates’ mouth. Whenever he can present the new ideas
plausibly as the outcome of thinking about Socrates’ thinking, then he assigns
them to Socrates. This is very important because Plato’s historical claim was
that Socrates was a man who thought for himself and taught others to do the
same. It is as if Plato were saying:
If you want
to be a follower of Socrates, then that means having to think for yourself and,
if necessary, to depart from ideas and subjects that Socrates had marked out for
his own.
Plato’s early ‘dialogues’, in
which Socrates deals with ethical questions, have a characteristic pattern:
-
Socrates happens by chance to find himself in the company of an interlocutor
and they enter into a speculative conversation;
-
the other person assumes that he knows the meaning of a very familiar term
(e.g., ‘friendship’, or ‘courage’, or ‘piety’);
-
simply by interrogating him very closely (i.e., by subjecting him to what has
come to be called ‘Socratic questioning’), Socrates shows this person – and,
more importantly, the on-lookers – that they did not have a very clear grasp
of the real meaning of the concept.
This technique is still used in
some universities even today to teach philosophy. One starts by exposing young
students to a familiar and important concept – one that is important in everyday
life – and one tries to get them to realise for themselves that there are real
difficulties inherent in that concept. One tries to get them to think about
these problems and even to produce answers. The point, however, is that the
answers are not necessarily firm, complete solutions but merely represent the
acquisition of a much better grasp of the concept than hitherto. One
has been drawn into the problem, are left still wanting to get to the answer and
feeling that, somehow and some day, one might actually be able to contribute to
achieving it.
After more than 2500 years we are still puzzling about
the meaning of concepts such as ‘beauty’, ‘loyalty’, ‘courage’, ‘fortitude’
etc. Perhaps, in one sense, we have made some progress towards achieving a
better understanding of such concepts and in another we have not. Plato would
have insisted, for example, that even if he did know the answers, it would not
have done us any good for him to simply tell us. He would claim that it is
in the very nature of these questions themselves that one has to puzzle them
out for oneself. An answer is worth nothing unless one strives to achieve it
though one’s own thinking.
In Plato’s early ‘dialogues’, therefore, the one thing
that Socrates keeps on saying is that he has no positive doctrines to teach.
He claims that all he is doing is asking awkward questions. But some underlying
doctrines, though not many, do emerge. One significant group of concepts
emerges in the Apology where Socrates claims that no real harm can come
to a genuinely good man either during his life or after his death. In the
Gorgias he argues at length that injustice harms the doer and
justice benefits the doer. What he seems to be claiming is that the only
real harm is harm to the soul. One may lose all of one’s money or be
stricken by a crippling disease but that is nothing compared to the damage done
– by oneself to oneself – if one leads an unjust life. Conversely, there is no
achievement like that which a good man has gained from the practice of virtue.
Consequently, there can be no loss that he would reckon as harm except
the loss of his virtue. Socrates is very emphatic about these ideas. These
are the points on which he claimed to have some knowledge. And this is an area
about which Plato never reneged on Socrates. He remained convinced of the truth
of the proposition that injustice actually harms the doer and that
justice really does benefit him who practises it. Providing one’s
soul remains unharmed, worldly misfortunes cannot actually do one much deep,
lasting damage.
However, there is another group of ideas about which
Socrates did not claim to have knowledge and about which Plato eventually does
renege on him. This group of concepts can be best summed up in the proposition:
‘Virtue is Knowledge’. Whenever someone asks in his early ‘dialogues’, ‘What is
piety?’, or ‘What is justice?’, sooner or later as the discussion proceeds a
suggestion begins to develop that this ‘virtue’ – be it either ‘ courage’, or
‘piety’, or ‘justice’ – should be properly regarded as a form of ‘knowledge’.
This concept is as strong and just as paradoxical as the first group of ideas.
Common sense ordinarily supposes that it must be one thing to have the wisdom to
know what it is best to do in a given situation and quite another thing to have
the necessary courage to do it – especially if that situation involves some
danger or difficulty – or to have the forbearance to resist taking an easier
option instead. So ‘Wisdom’ is one virtue, a quality that one might admire
legitimately in someone else; ‘Courage’ is yet another; ‘Temperance’ is yet
another still. One may have one of these and not the others; or one may have
them all but not to the same degree in each case. War and the virtues that it
engenders in some folk - qualities like Courage, Fortitude and Loyalty – seem
to be with us always. We have only to watch our TV screens to be reminded of
this fact very day. Furthermore, and away from the many battlefields and
bomb-torn streets and hills, many ordinary people display remarkable and
sustained courage in the face of the ordeals of their personal vicissitudes and
illnesses. That is why these Socratic questions are still relevant and worthy
of our consideration. The clues to their possible answers still resonate for
human nature has not changed all that much. Solutions might be sought, not
necessarily in lofty, spectacular locations or amongst important, knowledgeable
people but also in the quiet recesses of ordinary people’s private experience.
But if ‘Courage’ is just this kind of ‘Knowledge’ if what
it is best to do, then this kind of contrast cannot arise. If one does
not do the right thing, it cannot be that one knew what one should do in the
circumstances but lacked the courage to do it. Rather, if one lacked the
courage, then one lacked the knowledge. One did not know what was the right
thing to do. So, any wrongdoing that one does is done in ignorance. It is done
because one simply did not know what was the best thing to do in the prescribed
circumstances. However, anything that is done in ignorance is done
involuntarily. In other words, according to Socrates’ famous slogan: ‘No one
does wrong willingly!’
It may be difficult, some would even claim impossible,
for us now to believe that the sources of all of our actions are in our
conscious minds or even that they are available to our rational apperception.
But perhaps people then did not believe it either! Socrates seems to have been
deliberately and knowingly going against common sense. In the Protagoras,
for example, he actually describes his position about the meaning of ‘courage’
as one that is contrary to all human belief! The other side of the argument is,
however, that there are still philosophers who seem to argue that the only thing
which one possesses in order to put oneself into action is one’s belief about
what is good and what is bad. If those beliefs do not do that job, what else
can there be? Lots of people still find it very difficult to accept the truth
of the proposition that there is such a thing as ‘the will’ or that there are
forces other than merely cognitive ones functioning within human action.
The ‘dialogue’ format that Plato chose to write gives
rise to some important, related but perhaps insoluble questions:
1.
to what extent is this the historical Socrates whose view are
being presented?
2.
To what extent is this ‘Socrates’ merely a fictional creation
of Plato?
3.
What are Plato’s own views since almost very opinion expressed
therein is put into the mouth of
someone other than Plato?
In one sense, one does not need really to worry about
such questions. Plato’s portrait of Socrates makes this claim:
Here is a man who thought for
himself, who could over-throw long-cherished conclusions if it turned out, after
rational inquiry, that they were wrong and who taught others to do the same.
Therefore, if Plato came to think that there is more to
‘virtue’ than just ‘knowledge’ – though ‘knowledge’ does remain the most
important contributory factor to our definition and this is something which
Plato did hold - then it is completely within the spirit of the ‘Socratic’
tradition to reject the doctrine that ‘virtue’ = ‘knowledge’ and to produce a
better view of it. This is something that Plato did later in his Republic.
On the other hand, perhaps one should worry about the
questions raised. It is most important that one recognises that is happening
when the Socrates in the Republic says something which one knows to be
contrary to that said by the Socrates in, say, the Protagoras. It is
important to realise that we are being given a new view and how it connects with
all of the other concerns of the Republic. How, for example, it makes
for a much more complicated vision of moral education and how it makes a new
vision of the ideal political society possible. The important thing is
the process of inquiry. In other words, because one’s assumptions and
beliefs are open to perpetual questioning, our ‘conclusions’, such as they are,
do not have any special status. They are merely staging posts on the way to
making further inquiries.
Plato’s Middle Dialogues
In his so-called ‘middle period’ Plato began to put
forward his own ideas in ‘dialogues’ such as the Meno, the Phaedo,
the Republic, the Symposium and the Phaedrus. The two most
important of ideas were:
·
the theory of Forms and
·
the theory that ‘learning’ equals ‘recollection’.
I would like to comment on the second of these first.
Put briefly it claims that to learn something is to recover from within one’s
mind resources of knowledge that one had before one’s birth. Ideas closely
related to this concept have been more or less permanent in western culture.
For instance, Idealist philosophers have argued that there must be innate
knowledge, or innate ideas. Most of the world’s great religions make
that kind of assumption. Even 20th century linguists, such as Noam
Chomsky, argue that we are born with a whole grammar pre-programmed into our
minds. A belief of this kind deserves serious consideration.
Plato’s version of it was that knowledge is an
essential part of the nature of the soul. It is knowledge that
one’s soul possesses before one is born. Plato believed that the soul exists
before birth and its embodiment in the present world is just one of a series of
incarnations. But to understand the proposition that ‘learning’ is
‘recollection’, one needs to consider the Laches ‘dialogue’. Here the
main topic under discussion is: ‘What is courage?’ Laches, the general whom
Socrates has asked to define ‘courage’ suggests that it is a kind of endurance.
Socrates then asks him: ‘Is courage invariably a fine and admirable quality?’
Laches replies, ‘Yes!’ Then Socrates takes him though a series of examples of
endurance where Laches is obliged to see that endurance is not admirable at
all. Perhaps it is even foolhardy. Or it may just be morally neutral as when a
banker keeps on spending money, enduring the losses because he knows, from his
knowledge of the stock market, that he will get a profit eventually. So, if
endurance can be bad or morally neutral, but courage is always good, then
courage cannot be just endurance not even when the endurance is guided by
knowledge.
Logically, all that has happened is that Laches has been
shown that his beliefs are inconsistent. His answers, when they are taken
together, contradict each other. They cannot all be true. But that does not
tell us which one of Laches’ answers is false. Typically, Socrates presents the
situation as one in which the definition proposed by Laches (that courage is a
kind of endurance) has been refuted and shown to be false. In practice,
therefore, Plato had Socrates take Laches’ secondary answers as either true, or
somehow nearer to the truth, that his original definition. They are made the
basis for refuting that definition and for concluding that it was a false answer
that must be discarded.
This says something that is important to all serious
thinking. We tend to assume that through discussion we can get to the
truth. But it really does not have any special power to accomplish that.
The most that discussion can do is to show us that our conclusions either match
or do not match the premises of our arguments. And even if they do match, this
still does not make them true necessarily. The idea that we can arrive at the
truth via discussion is actually quite difficult to justify. Plato did not show
Socrates trying to justify it. Socrates merely asks his questions, gathered
answers to reveal an inherent contradiction and then claims to have refuted the
original definition. However, if one wanted to set up an explanation of what
Socrates is doing then one would have say that everyone has the means of making
that which is true vanquish that which is false. That is exactly what Plato did
in the Meno where he produces a theory of Socratic, or philosophical,
discussion. It claims that all of us have within our minds already a latent
knowledge of the correct answers to questions such as ‘What is courage?’ or
‘What is justice?’ etc. That knowledge is deep within us and is not accessible
immediately. It enables us to refute all of the wrong answers and to show that
they are wrong. And that knowledge is what emerges gradually in the Laches
where Plato writes that one proposition which Laches asserted was used by
Socrates to show that something else that Laches asserts must be false.
This doctrine yields the other, more influential one: the
theory of Forms. The Socratic ‘dialogues’ are centred on a quest for
definitions: e.g., ‘What is Courage?’, ‘What is Justice?’ or ‘What is Beauty?’
If we have latent knowledge of the correct answers to such questions and have
acquired that knowledge independently of and prior to our experience of living
in this world – the place where we use our physical senses while we move around
– then surely what we know of ‘Justice’, ‘Piety’, ‘Courage’ and ‘Beauty’ must
itself be independent of and prior to the empirical world which we inhabit.
This is the important theory of Forms: that virtues such as Justice and Beauty
etc., exist independently of and prior to all of the just actions and of all
just persons, of all the beautiful objects and beautiful people one could find
in the physical world. Beauty and Justice exist on their own and apart. They
exist in the realm of the Forms.
This theory that there is another ‘world’ or realm other
than this terrestrial one - an ideal world in which everything that gives
value and meaning to this world exists independently – has been of
crucial importance to the development of the whole of western culture. But,
although Plato uses phrases like ‘the world of Forms’ or ‘another world’, he did
not conceive of a simple contrast between one set of particular things and then
another set completely like it but more perfect, more abstract and located
somewhere else – perhaps somewhere in Heaven. Plato’s contrast is between the
particular and the general. Those questions ‘What is Justice?’, ‘What is
Beauty? etc., are general questions. They are not questions about the
here and now.
In a passage in the Phaedo ‘dialogue’ Socrates
asserts that to do philosophy is, in a way, to rehearse for death. Being dead
is having one’s soul separate from one’s body. In doing philosophy one is, so
far as one can, separating one’s soul from one’s body precisely because one is
not thinking about the here and now where one’s body lies restricted. If one
asks the question ‘What is Justice?’ with reference to justice anywhere or at
any time – in other words ‘What is Justice itself?’ – one is not inquiring ‘Who
did me wrong yesterday or today?’ If one asks the question ‘What is Beauty?’,
one is not inquiring ‘What is the most beautiful object in this room?’ And if
one is not interested in the here and the now, then - in a sense that Plato was
interested in – one is not here and now. One is where one’s mind is – not
because one is in some other particular place or a better one. One is not in a
place in that sense at all. One is immersed in generalities. So, ‘the world of
Forms’ means ‘the realm of invariable generalities’. This, the physical
universe which we inhabit is merely a place reflection of a realm of eternal
verities. It is the existence of that realm that bestows on us our concrete
environment and our experience of it in the here and now. It provides the
metaphysical underpinning of all that we can and do perceive in our daily lives.
In the Republic, more than in any other
‘dialogue’, Plato asserts that every philosophical question is connected with
every other. The inquiry need never stop. Every conclusion leads to the next
problem. Hence, he begins with another fairly straightforward, familiar kind of
‘Socratic’ question: ‘What is Justice?’ This leads to another question: ‘Is
Justice a benefit to its possessor?’ The aim of the Republic is to show
that Justice is a benefit to its possessor. It is what one needs most of all if
one is to be happy. The unjust man is the most miserable of all creatures.
To demonstrate this, however, Plato has to outline a
theory of human nature. He divides the soul into three parts. This is where he
reneges on Socrates’ theory that ‘Virtue’ equals ‘Knowledge’. ‘Virtue’ involves
more than ‘Knowledge’, although ‘Knowledge’ must be in control. The concept
that ‘knowledge’ is something that can, and should, be in control of the
non-rational factors in the soul also makes viable the concept of a whole
society in which ‘knowledge’ is in control. Hence, we get a political theory
that depicts a new and better way of life in society. At the same time, Plato
emphasises other concurrent questions:
1.
‘What knowledge should be in control?’;
2.
‘What is knowledge anyway?’ and
3.
‘Why is it better than opinion?’
Hence, in the Republic, Plato gives a theory of
knowledge. This broadens out to become an inquiry into the nature of science.
There is an elaborate discussion about mathematics. He produces an entire
vision of what it would be like to have a complete understanding of the world we
inhabit in order to support the claim that this understanding really is what
should be in charge of ourselves, both individually and in society. It is this
understand that will the benefits of justice to the individual and the society
generally.
Plato’s Later Dialogues
The late ‘dialogues’ are less literary, perhaps less
dramatic, less colourful and more analytical. The irony and imagery and other
literary resources which Plato used in his previous works to depict people
undertaking discussions are now employed to bring the ideas and the arguments
themselves to life. Very often they are ideas and arguments familiar from the
earlier works. Plato was the first writer to establish a relationship with his
readers so that when he was writing one work he took it for granted that his
readers would have read his previous works already. He uses this relationship
to build up allusions, resonances and to create surprises when he departs from
readers’ reasonable expectations. In fact, he conducts a sort of public
self-examination of his earlier ideas and relies on readers recognising them.
At the same time it is as though he was admitting:
Don’t become too attached to
the ideas in the Phaedo or the Republic. They were all very good,
of course, but those truths – if truths they were – are not good to anyone if
they cannot be defended against criticism. I propose to take some of them and
subject them to really hard critical examination!
Perhaps the best example of this new, self-imposed task
of Plato is in his Parmenides ‘dialogue’. Here the tables are turned on
Socrates. He is depicted as putting forward the theory of Forms as formulated
in the Phaedo. The allusions are clearly to the Phaedo, not only
as far as the content is concerned but even to verbal parallels which Plato
obviously expects perceptive readers to pick up for themselves. Socrates is now
on the receiving end of some awkward questioning. In fact, old Parmenides, who
is quizzing Socrates in this ‘dialogue’, produces a series of devastating
objections to the theory of Forms. Plato does not tell the answers to these
criticisms. He leaves it to us to decide for ourselves whether or not they are
fair or unfair and what, if they are fair, we ought to do with the theory of
Forms.
The Timaeus ‘dialogue’ stands apart from the rest
partly because it contains more cosmology and science than philosophy but it
also contains a beautiful Creation myth which is similar to that expounded in
the Book of Genesis. The important question about this is: ‘Did Plato believe
this literally?’ The whole concept of Creation was controversial even in
Plato’s day. His closest associates took the view that Timaeus’ narrative of
the Divine Craftsman imposing order on chaos is just a vivid, dramatic way of
presenting Plato’s analysis of the fundamental structure of the universe.
Plato conceived of the whole universe as order imposed on disorder.
By ‘order’ he meant, of course, ‘mathematical order’. This is, of course, very
different from the narrative contained in other Creation myths. For Plato
the Divine Craftsman is simply a personification of a mathematical
Intelligence at work. It is a poetical way of explaining the
intelligibility of physical reality that had hitherto been a profound mystery
for thinking human beings. The general proposition that the universe is the
product of imposing order on disorder is not one which can be proved either in
general or in detail. Plato was well aware of this and that was why he clothed
the proposition in the literary form of a myth.
Nevertheless, that myth served as the guiding inspiration
for those leading mathematicians whose aid he enlisted in the Athenian Academy.
Every advance in geometry, astronomy, harmonics – even the medical theory which
asserted that health and disease are the results of proportions between those
constituent elements in the human body – all of them are seen as further proofs
of something that Plato cared deeply about: the idea that mathematical
irregularities, harmonies and proportions explain things. Since these
mathematical harmonies and proportions are prime examples of goodness and beauty
for Plato, this research programme of the Academy was one that was designed to
demonstrate that goodness and beauty are the fundamental explanatory factors in
the universe.
This fits precisely with what had been proposed in the
Republic, which is a sketch of a programme for a scientific, especially for
a mathematically scientific understanding of the universe. In the Timaeus
Plato begins his carrying out of that work programme. The cosmology and science
contained in the Timaeus are the practical working out of the
possibilities that had been canvassed in the Republic. Indeed, the
Timaeus is presented, in its introduction, as a continuation of the
discussion which had taken place in the Republic. Furthermore, the
research programme, or the recommendations for making further progress in the
mathematical sciences contained in the Republic, was actually being
carried out by those leading scholars whom Plato recruited for his Academy in
Athens in order to demonstrate the power and scope of mathematical order. It
was from their work that many of the greatest achievements in Greek mathematical
sciences were devolved – down to the time of Ptolomy. Indeed, Ptolomy’s
astronomy was the ultimate descendant from the work in mathematical science done
in Plato’s Academy – work that was underpinned by Plato’s recommendations.
Since for Plato mathematical order was the expression of goodness and beauty in
the universe, those sciences which demonstrate the universe as being
mathematically intelligible are also science of value. This is how the
metaphysical elements in the Republic ‘dialogue’ (i.e., everything that
makes up the content of that understanding which the philosopher-rulers must
acquire) can simultaneously be the foundation for a radical new kind of
politics. What these philosophers were learning before they can come to rule
over the rest are science of value as well as science of fact.
The Theaetetus, another of these later
‘dialogues’, is concerned with the perennially puzzling question: ‘What is
knowledge?’ It is a kind of ‘Socratic’ discussion that went on in the earlier
‘dialogues’ but composed on a much grander scale. Plato gives three possible
answers:
·
knowledge is perception;
·
knowledge is true judgement and
·
knowledge is true judgement plus a description of it.
Each of these propositions is knocked down one by one in
the familiar ‘Socratic’ manner. However, in the end we are not told what Plato
thinks knowledge is but we have learnt a great deal more about the problem.
Opinion is still very much divided about what is knowledge. A generally
accepted view is that which combines all three propositions by asserting that
the judgements which constitute knowledge must be derived ultimately from
perception but we must provide a rational justification for them.
Plato’s Legacy
In the Classical world there were two philosophical
traditions that were opposed to Materialism which manifested itself in Atomism
as expounded by Democritus and later by Epicurus. Both Plato and Aristotle
were anti-Materialist philosophers. Both were opposed to the idea that
everything that we hold dear – life, order, mind, civilisation, art, Nature –
can be adequately explained as being only the outcomes of the movements of
particles of Matter, subject to the Laws of Motion and to their own nature.
Aristotle’s opposition to this unremittingly bleak view
of the universe carried the battle far into the enemy’s camp so that it is very
difficult to reconcile Aristotelianism with modern scientific enterprise which
has a good deal to say about atoms and the movements of particles of matter. It
was, perhaps, no accident that the modern scientific enterprise began by
throwing away the Aristotelianism that had dominated European culture for so
long during the Medieval Ages.
Platonism, however, is much easier to reconcile with
modern science which may be why it survived on into the Renaissance after the
eventual demise of Aristotelianism. Platonism is a philosophical tendency that
can be used if one wants to show how scientific and spiritual values can be
reconciled. If one wants to deal with the myriad of complexities in which
Materialism is much too simplistic, then Platonism can still make something of a
useful contribution. There may be something peculiarly contemporary about a
philosophical tendency that still enables men to fit together the task of
acquiring a genuine understanding of the universe with mathematical physics
playing a central role. One has only to think, in this context, of the very
persuasive books written so well by Prof. Paul Davies, formerly of Newcastle.
But what has all of this abstraction to do with us, as
Rosicrucians and members of SRIA? Well, the obvious connection, of course, is
that in the Fourth Grade ceremony (that of ‘Philosophus’) we are enjoined to
study the great philosophies and religions of the world. There can be no doubt
that Plato is among that august assembly, for there can hardly be anyone who has
not heard at least something about him and most folk are aware of his name at
least. He dominates the intellectual history of the west even today and his
influence is felt in many different aspects of our culture. He is rightly
regarded as one of the founding fathers of civilisation – as we know it. So for
that powerful reason Plato merits our careful attention.
There is, however, another, more subtle reason why we, as
Christians first and then Rosicrucians, ought to study Plato’s teachings,
particularly with regard to his doctrine of the Forms. For Plato materiality
is merely the physical manifestation of ideal Forms. In other words, the
physical universe, or the whole of reality (if you prefer) was the manifestation
of a supra-mundane realm of eternal Forms. The highest of these, and that which
encompasses of all them, is the Summum Bonum (the Supreme Good),
or God Himself. Now, we have the best example of the impingement or
manifestation of the Summum Bonum in the Word made flesh: i.e., Jesus
Christ. The marvel of the Incarnation should be, for us as Christians, the
overwhelming proof of the Platonic doctrine of the Forms. And it is surely for
that especial reason alone, if for no other, Plato merits our reconsideration
even when nearly 2500 years have slipped away into eternity since he lived
amongst his fellow mortals.
APPENDIX
List of
Plato’s Known Writings
[NB – In spite of centuries of unremitting, scholarly
effort which continues even today, no one can claim that a consensus has been
achieved yet about the order of the composition of these writings. The
following list is, therefore, tentative!]
A.
His Early Period
1.
Hippias Major
2.
Hippias Minor
3.
Ion
4.
Menexenus
5.
Charmides
6.
Laches
7.
Lysis
8.
Cartylus
9.
Euthydemus
10.
Gorgias
11.
Meno
12.
Euthyphro
13.
Apology
14.
Crito
B.
His Middle Period
15.
Phaedo
16.
Symposium
17.
Protagoras
18.
Republic
C.
His Last Period
19.
Phaedrus
20.
Theaetetus
21.
Parmenides
22.
Sophistes
23.
Policitus
24.
Philebus
25.
Timaeus
26.
Critias
27.
Laws
28.
Epinomis
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