Plato Greek philosopher
Plato, (born 428/427 bce, Athens, Greece—died 348/347, Athens), ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates (c. 470–399 bce), teacher of Aristotle (384–322 bce), and founder of the Academy, best known as the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence.
Plato, marble portrait bust, from an original of the 4th century bce; in the Capitoline Museums, …G. Dagli Orti—DeA Picture Library/Learning Pictures
Building on the demonstration by Socrates that those regarded as experts in ethical matters did not have the understanding necessary for a good human life, Plato introduced the idea that their mistakes were due to their not engaging properly with a class of entities he called forms, chief examples of which were Justice,
Beauty, and Equality. Whereas other thinkers—and Plato himself in
certain passages—used the term without any precise technical force,
Plato in the course of his career came to devote specialized attention
to these entities. As he conceived them, they were accessible not to the
senses but to the mind alone, and they were the most important constituents of reality, underlying the existence of the sensible world and giving it what intelligibility it has. In metaphysics Plato envisioned a systematic, rational treatment of the forms and their interrelations, starting with the most fundamental among them (the Good, or the One); in ethics and moral
psychology he developed the view that the good life requires not just a
certain kind of knowledge (as Socrates had suggested) but also
habituation to healthy emotional responses and therefore harmony between
the three parts of the soul (according to Plato, reason, spirit, and appetite). His works also contain discussions in aesthetics, political philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. His school fostered research not just in philosophy narrowly conceived but in a wide range of endeavours that today would be called mathematical or scientific.
Life
The
son of Ariston (his father) and Perictione (his mother), Plato was born
in the year after the death of the great Athenian statesman Pericles. His brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus are portrayed as interlocutors in Plato’s masterpiece the Republic, and his half brother Antiphon figures in the Parmenides. Plato’s family was aristocratic and distinguished: his father’s side claimed descent from the god Poseidon, and his mother’s side was related to the lawgiver Solon (c. 630–560 bce). Less creditably, his mother’s close relatives Critias and Charmides were among the Thirty Tyrants who seized power in Athens and ruled briefly until the restoration of democracy in 403.
Plato as a young man was a member of the circle around Socrates.
Since the latter wrote nothing, what is known of his characteristic
activity of engaging his fellow citizens (and the occasional itinerant
celebrity) in conversation derives wholly from the writings of others,
most notably Plato himself. The works of Plato commonly referred to as
“Socratic” represent the sort of thing the historical Socrates was
doing. He would challenge men who supposedly had expertise about some
facet of human excellence to give accounts of these matters—variously of
courage, piety, and so on, or at times of the whole of “virtue”—and
they typically failed to maintain their position. Resentment against
Socrates grew, leading ultimately to his trial and execution on charges
of impiety and corrupting the youth in 399. Plato was profoundly
affected by both the life and the death of Socrates. The activity of the
older man provided the starting point of Plato’s philosophizing.
Moreover, if Plato’s Seventh Letter is to be believed (its authorship is disputed), the treatment of Socrates by both the oligarchy and the democracy made Plato wary of entering public life, as someone of his background would normally have done.
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After the death of Socrates, Plato may have traveled extensively in Greece, Italy, and Egypt, though on such particulars the evidence is uncertain. The followers of Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 bce) seem to have influenced his philosophical program (they are criticized in the Phaedo and the Republic but receive respectful mention in the Philebus). It is thought that his three trips to Syracuse in Sicily (many of the Letters concern these, though their authenticity is controversial) led to a deep personal attachment to Dion (408–354 bce), brother-in-law of Dionysius the Elder (430–367 bce), the tyrant
of Syracuse. Plato, at Dion’s urging, apparently undertook to put into
practice the ideal of the “philosopher-king” (described in the Republic) by educating Dionysius the Younger; the project was not a success, and in the ensuing instability Dion was murdered.
Plato’s Academy, founded in the 380s, was the ultimate ancestor of the modern university (hence the English term academic); an influential centre of research and learning, it attracted many men of outstanding ability. The great mathematicians Theaetetus (417–369 bce) and Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 395–c. 342 bce)
were associated with it. Although Plato was not a research
mathematician, he was aware of the results of those who were, and he
made use of them in his own work. For 20 years Aristotle was also a member of the Academy. He started his own school, the Lyceum,
only after Plato’s death, when he was passed over as Plato’s successor
at the Academy, probably because of his connections to the court of
Macedonia.
Because Aristotle often
discusses issues by contrasting his views with those of his teacher, it
is easy to be impressed by the ways in which they diverge. Thus, whereas
for Plato the crown of ethics is the good
in general, or Goodness itself (the Good), for Aristotle it is the good
for human beings; and whereas for Plato the genus to which a thing
belongs possesses a greater reality than the thing itself, for Aristotle
the opposite is true. Plato’s emphasis on the ideal, and Aristotle’s on
the worldly, informs Raphael’s depiction of the two philosophers in the School of Athens (1508–11). But if one considers the two philosophers not just in relation to each other but in the context of the whole of Western philosophy,
it is clear how much Aristotle’s program is continuous with that of his
teacher. (Indeed, the painting may be said to represent this continuity by showing the two men conversing amicably.) In any case, the Academy did not impose a dogmatic orthodoxy and in fact seems to have fostered a spirit of independent inquiry; at a later time it took on a skeptical orientation.
Plato once delivered a public lecture, “
On the Good,” in which he mystified his audience by announcing, “the Good is one.” He better gauged his readers in his dialogues, many of which are accessible, entertaining, and inviting. Although Plato is well known for his negative remarks about much great literature, in the Symposium he depicts literature and philosophy as the offspring of lovers, who gain a more lasting posterity than do parents of mortal children. His own literary and philosophical gifts ensure that something of Plato will live on for as long as readers engage with his works.
Dating, editing, translation
Plato’s works are traditionally arranged in a manner deriving from Thrasyllus of Alexandria (flourished 1st century ce): 36 works (counting the Letters
as one) are divided into nine groups of four. But the ordering of
Thrasyllus makes no sense for a reader today. Unfortunately, the order
of composition
of Plato’s works cannot be known. Conjecture regarding chronology has
been based on two kinds of consideration: perceived development in
content and “stylometry,” or the study of special features of prose
style, now executed with the aid of computers. By combining the two
kinds of consideration, scholars have arrived at a widely used rough
grouping of works, labeled with the traditional designations of early, middle, and late dialogues.
These groups can also be thought of as the Socratic works (based on the
activities of the historical Socrates), the literary masterpieces, and
the technical studies (see below Works individually described).
Phaedo by Plato; portion of manuscript, 3rd century bce.Heritage-Images/Imagestate
Each
of Plato’s dialogues has been transmitted substantially as he left it.
However, it is important to be aware of the causal chain that connects
modern readers to Greek authors of Plato’s time. To survive until the
era of printing, an ancient author’s words had to be copied by hand, and
the copies had to be copied, and so on over the course of centuries—by
which time the original would have long perished. The copying process
inevitably resulted in some corruption, which is often shown by
disagreement between rival manuscript traditions.
Even if some Platonic
“urtext” had survived, however, it would not be anything like what is
published in a modern edition of Plato’s works. Writing in Plato’s time
did not employ word divisions and punctuation or the present-day
distinction between capital and lowercase letters. These features
represent the contributions of scholars of many generations and
countries, as does the ongoing attempt to correct for corruption.
(Important variant readings and suggestions are commonly printed at the
bottom of each page of text, forming the apparatus criticus.)
In the great majority of cases only one decision is possible, but there
are instances—some of crucial importance—where several courses can be
adopted and where the resulting readings have widely differing import.
Thus, the preparation of an edition of Plato’s works involves an
enormous interpretive component. The work of the translator imports
another layer of similar judgments. Some Greek sentences admit of
several fundamentally different grammatical construals with widely
differing senses, and many ancient Greek words have no neat English
equivalents.
A notable artifact
of the work of translators and scholars is a device of selective
capitalization sometimes employed in English. To mark the objects of
Plato’s special interest, the forms, some follow a convention in which
one capitalizes the term Form (or Idea) as well as the names of particular forms, such as Justice, the Good,
and so on. Others have employed a variant of this convention in which
capitalization is used to indicate a special way in which Plato is
supposed to have thought of the forms during a certain period (i.e., as
“separate” from sensible particulars, the nature of this separation then
being the subject of interpretative controversy). Still others do not
use capital letters for any such purpose. Readers will do best to keep
in mind that such devices are in any case only suggestions.
In
recent centuries there have been some changes in the purpose and style
of English translations of ancient philosophy. The great Plato
translation by Benjamin Jowett
(1817–93), for example, was not intended as a tool of scholarship;
anyone who would undertake such a study already knew ancient Greek.
Instead, it made Plato’s corpus generally accessible in English prose of
considerable merit. At the other extreme was a type of translation that
aimed to be useful to serious students and professional philosophers
who did not know Greek; its goal was to indicate as clearly as possible
the philosophical potentialities of the text, however much readability
suffered in consequence. Exemplars of this style, which was much in
vogue in the second half of the 20th century, are the series published
by the Clarendon Press and also, in a different tradition, the
translations undertaken by followers of Leo Strauss (1899–1973). Except in a few cases, however, the gains envisioned by this notion of fidelity proved to be elusive.
Despite,
but also because of, the many factors that mediate the contemporary
reader’s access to Plato’s works, many dialogues are conveyed quite well
in translation. This is particularly true of the short, Socratic
dialogues. In the case of works that are large-scale literary
masterpieces, such as the Phaedrus, a translation of course
cannot match the artistry of the original. Finally, because translators
of difficult technical studies such as the Parmenides and the Sophist
must make basic interpretive decisions in order to render any English
at all, reading their work is very far from reading Plato. In the case
of these dialogues, familiarity with commentaries and other secondary
literature and a knowledge of ancient Greek are highly desirable.
Dialogue form
Glimpsed
darkly even through translation’s glass, Plato is a great literary
artist. Yet he also made notoriously negative remarks about the value of
writing. Similarly, although he believed that at least one of the
purposes—if not the main purpose—of philosophy is to enable one to live a
good life, by composing dialogues rather than treatises or hortatory letters he omitted to tell his readers directly any useful truths to live by.
Plato conversing with his pupils, mosaic from Pompeii, 1st century bce.© CM Dixon/Heritage-Images/Imagestate
One way of resolving these apparent tensions is to reflect on Plato’s conception
of philosophy. An important aspect of this conception, one that has
been shared by many philosophers since Plato’s time, is that philosophy
aims not so much at discovering facts or establishing dogmas as at achieving wisdom or understanding (the Greek term philosophia
means “love of wisdom”). This wisdom or understanding is an extremely
hard-won possession; it is no exaggeration to say that it is the result
of a lifetime’s effort, if it is achieved at all. Moreover, it is a
possession that each person must win for himself. The writing or
conversation of others may aid philosophical progress but cannot
guarantee it. Contact with a living person, however, has certain
advantages over an encounter with a piece of writing. As Plato pointed
out, writing is limited by its fixity: it cannot modify itself to suit
the individual reader or add anything new in response to queries. So it
is only natural that Plato had limited expectations about what written
works could achieve. On the other hand, he clearly did not believe that
writing has no philosophical value. Written works still serve a purpose,
as ways of interacting with inhabitants of times and places beyond the
author’s own and as a medium in which ideas can be explored and tested.
Dialogue
form suits a philosopher of Plato’s type. His use of dramatic elements,
including humour, draws the reader in. Plato is unmatched in his
ability to re-create the experience of conversation. The dialogues
contain, in addition to Socrates and other authority figures, huge
numbers of additional characters, some of whom act as representatives of
certain classes of reader (as Glaucon may be a representative of
talented and politically ambitious youth). These characters function not
only to carry forward particular lines of thought but also to inspire
readers to do the same—to join imaginatively in the discussion by
constructing arguments and objections of their own. Spurring readers to
philosophical activity is the primary purpose of the dialogues.
Because
Plato himself never appears in any of these works and because many of
them end with the interlocutors in aporia, or at a loss, some scholars
have concluded that Plato was not recommending any particular views or
even that he believed that there was nothing to choose between the views
he presented. But the circumstance that he never says anything in his
own person is also compatible with the more common impression that some
of the suggestions he so compellingly puts forward are his own. Further,
there are cases where one may suppose that Plato sets an exercise that
the reader must work through so as to gain the benefit of philosophical
progress that cannot be obtained merely by being told “the answer.”
Although attributing views to Plato on the basis of such reconstructions
must be conjectural, it is clear that the process of engaging in such
activity so as to arrive at adequate views is one that he wanted his
readers to pursue.
Happiness and virtue
The characteristic question of ancient ethics
is “How can I be happy?” and the basic answer to it is “by means of
virtue.” But in the relevant sense of the word, happiness—the
conventional English translation of the ancient Greek eudaimonia—is not a matter of occurrent mood or affective state. Rather, as in a slightly archaic
English usage, it is a matter of having things go well. Being happy in
this sense is living a life of what some scholars call “human
flourishing.” Thus, the question “How can I be happy?” is equivalent to
“How can I live a good life?”
Whereas the notion of happiness in Greek philosophy applies at most to living things, that of arete—“virtue” or “excellence”—applies much more widely. Anything that has a characteristic use, function, or activity has a virtue or excellence, which is whatever disposition
enables things of that kind to perform well. The excellence of a race
horse is whatever enables it to run well; the excellence of a knife is
whatever enables it to cut well; and the excellence of an eye is
whatever enables it to see well. Human virtue, accordingly, is whatever
enables human beings to live good lives. Thus the notions of happiness and virtue are linked.
In
the case of a bodily organ such as the eye, it is fairly clear wherein
good functioning consists. But it is far from obvious what a good life
consists of, and so it is difficult to say what virtue, the condition
that makes it possible, might be. Traditional Greek conceptions
of the good life included the life of prosperity and the life of social
position, in which case virtue would be the possession of wealth or nobility
(and perhaps physical beauty). The overwhelming tendency of ancient
philosophy, however, was to conceive of the good life as something that
is the achievement of an individual and that, once won, is hard to take
away.
Already by Plato’s time a conventional set
of virtues had come to be recognized by the larger culture; they
included courage, justice, piety, modesty or temperance, and wisdom.
Socrates and Plato undertook to discover what these virtues really
amount to. A truly satisfactory account of any virtue would identify
what it is, show how possessing it enables one to live well, and
indicate how it is best acquired.
In Plato’s representation of the activity of the historical Socrates, the interlocutors are examined in a search for definitions
of the virtues. It is important to understand, however, that the
definition sought for is not lexical, merely specifying what a speaker
of the language
would understand the term to mean as a matter of linguistic competence.
Rather, the definition is one that gives an account of the real nature
of the thing named by the term; accordingly, it is sometimes called a
“real” definition. The real definition of water, for example, is H2O, though speakers in most historical eras did not know this.
In
the encounters Plato portrays, the interlocutors typically offer an
example of the virtue they are asked to define (not the right kind of
answer) or give a general account (the right kind of answer) that fails
to accord with their intuitions
on related matters. Socrates tends to suggest that virtue is not a
matter of outward behaviour but is or involves a special kind of
knowledge (knowledge of good and evil or knowledge of the use of other
things).
The Protagoras
addresses the question of whether the various commonly recognized
virtues are different or really one. Proceeding from the interlocutor’s
assertion that the many have nothing to offer as their notion of the
good besides pleasure, Socrates develops a picture of the agent according to which the great art necessary for a good human life is measuring and calculation; knowledge of the magnitudes of future pleasures and pains
is all that is needed. If pleasure is the only object of desire, it
seems unintelligible what, besides simple miscalculation, could cause
anyone to behave badly. Thus the whole of virtue would consist of a
certain kind of wisdom. The idea that knowledge
is all that one needs for a good life, and that there is no aspect of
character that is not reducible to cognition (and so no moral or
emotional failure that is not a cognitive failure), is the characteristically Socratic position.
In the Republic,
however, Plato develops a view of happiness and virtue that departs
from that of Socrates. According to Plato, there are three parts of the soul, each with its own object of desire. Reason
desires truth and the good of the whole individual, spirit is
preoccupied with honour and competitive values, and appetite has the
traditional low tastes for food, drink, and sex. Because the soul is
complex, erroneous
calculation is not the only way it can go wrong. The three parts can
pull in different directions, and the low element, in a soul in which it
is overdeveloped, can win out. Correspondingly, the good condition of
the soul involves more than just cognitive excellence. In the terms of
the Republic, the healthy or just soul has psychic harmony—the
condition in which each of the three parts does its job properly. Thus,
reason understands the Good in general and desires the actual good of
the individual, and the other two parts of the soul desire what it is
good for them to desire, so that spirit and appetite are activated by
things that are healthy and proper.
Although the dialogue
starts from the question “Why should I be just?,” Socrates proposes
that this inquiry can be advanced by examining justice “writ large” in
an ideal city. Thus, the political discussion is undertaken to aid the
ethical one. One early hint of the existence of the three parts of the soul in the individual is the existence of three classes in the well-functioning state:
rulers, guardians, and producers. The wise state is the one in which
the rulers understand the good; the courageous state is that in which
the guardians can retain in the heat of battle the judgments handed down
by the rulers about what is to be feared; the temperate state is that
in which all citizens agree about who is to rule; and the just state is
that in which each of the three classes does its own work properly.
Thus, for the city to be fully virtuous, each citizen must contribute
appropriately.
Justice as conceived in the Republic is so comprehensive
that a person who possessed it would also possess all the other
virtues, thereby achieving “the health of that whereby we live [the
soul].” Yet, lest it be thought that habituation and correct instruction in human affairs alone can lead to this condition, one must keep in view that the Republic also develops the famous doctrine according to which reason
cannot properly understand the human good or anything else without
grasping the form of the Good itself. Thus the original inquiry, whose
starting point was a motivation each individual is presumed to have (to
learn how to live well), leads to a highly ambitious educational
program. Starting with exposure only to salutary stories, poetry, and
music from childhood and continuing with supervised habituation to good
action and years of training in a series of mathematical disciplines, this program—and so virtue—would be complete only in the person who was able to grasp the first principle, the Good, and to proceed on that basis to secure accounts of the other realities. There are hints in the Republic, as well as in the tradition concerning Plato’s lecture “
On the Good” and in several of the more technical dialogues that this first principle is identical with Unity, or the One.
Dialectic
Plato uses the term dialectic throughout his works to refer to whatever method he happens to be recommending as the vehicle of philosophy. The term, from dialegesthai, meaning
to converse or talk through, gives insight into his core conception of
the project. Yet it is also evident that he stresses different aspects
of the conversational method in different dialogues.
The
form of dialectic featured in the Socratic works became the basis of
subsequent practice in the Academy—where it was taught by Aristotle—and in the teachings of the Skeptics during the Hellenistic Age.
While the conversation in a Socratic dialogue unfolds naturally, it
features a process by which even someone who lacks knowledge of a given
subject (as Socrates in these works claims to do) may test the
understanding of a putative
expert. The testing consists of a series of questions posed in
connection with a position the interlocutor is trying to uphold. The
method presupposes that one cannot have knowledge of any fact in
isolation; what is known must be embedded in a larger explanatory
structure. Thus, in order to know if a certain act is pious, one must
know what piety is. This requirement licenses the questioner to ask the
respondent about issues suitably related to his original claim. If, in
the course of this process, a contradiction emerges, the supposed expert
is revealed not to command knowledge after all: if he did, his grasp of
the truth would have enabled him to avoid contradiction. While both
Socrates and the Skeptics hoped to find the truth (a skeptikos
is after all a “seeker”), the method all too often reveals only the
inadequacy of the respondent. Since he has fallen into contradiction, it
follows that he is not an expert, but this does not automatically
reveal what the truth is.
By the time of the composition of the Republic,
Plato’s focus had shifted to developing positive views, and thus
“dialectic” was now thought of not as a technique of testing but as a
means of “saying of each thing what it is.” The Republic stresses that true dialectic is performed by thinking solely of the abstract and nonsensible realm of forms; it requires that reason secure an unhypothetical first principle (the Good)
and then derive other results in light of it. Since this part of the
dialogue is merely a programmatic sketch, however, no actual examples of
the activity are provided, and indeed some readers have wondered
whether it is really possible.
In the later dialogue Parmenides,
dialectic is introduced as an exercise that the young Socrates must
undertake if he is to understand the forms properly. The exercise, which
Parmenides
demonstrates in the second part of the work, is extremely laborious: a
single instance involves the construction of eight sections of argument;
the demonstration then takes up some three-quarters of the dialogue.
The exercise challenges the reader to make a distinction associated with
a sophisticated development of the theory of Platonic forms (see below The theory of forms).
Even after a general understanding has been achieved, repeating the
exercise with different subjects allows one to grasp each subject’s role
in the world.
This
understanding of dialectic gives a central place to specifying each
subject’s account in terms of genus and differentiae (and so, relatedly,
to mapping its position in a genus-species tree). The Phaedrus
calls the dialectician the person who can specify these relations—and
thereby “carve reality at the joints.” Continuity among all the kinds of
dialectic in Plato comes from the fact that the genus-species divisions
of the late works are a way of providing the accounts that dialectic
sought in all the previous works.
The theory of forms
Plato
is both famous and infamous for his theory of forms. Just what the
theory is, and whether it was ever viable, are matters of extreme
controversy. To readers who approach Plato in English, the relationship
between forms and sensible particulars, called in translation
“participation,” seems purposely mysterious. Moreover, the claim that
the sensible realm is not fully real, and that it contrasts in this
respect with the “pure being” of the forms, is perplexing. A
satisfactory interpretation of the theory must rely on both historical
knowledge and philosophical imagination.
Plato (left) and Aristotle, detail from School of Athens, fresco by …Album/Oronoz/SuperStock
Linguistic and philosophical background
The terms that Plato uses to refer to forms, idea and eidos, ultimately derive from the verb eidô, “to look.” Thus, an idea or eidos would be the look a thing presents, as when one speaks of a vase as having a lovely form. (Because the mentalistic connotation of idea in English is misleading—the Parmenides
shows that forms cannot be ideas in a mind—this translation has fallen
from favour.) Both terms can also be used in a more general sense to
refer to any feature that two or more things have in common or to a kind
of thing based on that feature. The English word form is
similar. The sentence “The pottery comes in two forms” can be glossed as
meaning either that the pottery is made in two shapes or that there are
two kinds of pottery. When Plato wants to contrast genus with species,
he tends to use the terms genos and eidos, translated
as “genus” and “species,” respectively. Although it is appropriate in
the context to translate these as “genus” and “species,” respectively,
it is important not to lose sight of the continuity provided by the word
eidos: even in these passages Plato is referring to the same kind of entities as always, the forms.
Another linguistic consideration that should be taken into account is the ambiguity
of ancient Greek terms of the sort that would be rendered into
unidiomatic English as “the dark” or “the beautiful.” Such terms may
refer to a particular individual that exhibits the feature in question,
as when “the beautiful [one]” is used to refer to Achilles,
but they may also refer to the features themselves, as when “the
beautiful” is used to refer to something Achilles has. “The beautiful”
in the latter usage may then be thought of as something general that all
beautiful particulars have in common. In Plato’s time, unambiguously
abstract terms—corresponding to the English words “darkness” and
“beauty”—came to be used as a way of avoiding the ambiguity inherent in the original terminology. Plato uses both kinds of terms.
By
Plato’s time there was also important philosophical precedent for using
terms such as “the dark” and “the beautiful” to refer to metaphysically
fundamental entities. Anaxagoras (c. 500–c. 428 bce),
the great pre-Socratic natural scientist, posited a long list of
fundamental stuffs, holding that what are ordinarily understood as
individuals are actually composites made up of shares or portions of
these stuffs. The properties of sensible composites depend on which of
their ingredients are predominant. Change, generation, and destruction
in sensible particulars are conceived in terms of shifting combinations
of portions of fundamental stuffs, which themselves are eternal and
unchanging and accessible to the mind but not to the senses.
For
Anaxagoras, having a share of something is straightforward: a
particular composite possesses as a physical ingredient a material
portion of the fundamental stuff in question. For example, a thing is
observably hot because it possesses a sufficiently large portion of “the
hot,” which is thought of as the totality of heat in the world. The hot
is itself hot, and this is why portions of it account for the warmth of
composites. (In general, the fundamental stuffs posited by Anaxagoras
themselves possessed the qualities they were supposed to account for in
sensible particulars.) These portions are qualitatively identical to
each other and to portions of the hot that are lost by whatever becomes
less warm; they can move around the cosmos, being transferred from one
composite to another, as heat may move from hot bathwater to Hector as it warms him up.
Plato’s
theory can be seen as a successor to that of Anaxagoras. Like
Anaxagoras, Plato posits fundamental entities that are eternal and
unchanging and accessible to the mind but not to the senses. And, as in
Anaxagoras’s theory, in Plato’s theory sensible particulars display a
given feature because they have a portion of the underlying thing
itself. The Greek term used by both authors, metechei, is
traditionally rendered as “participates in” in translations of Plato but
as “has a portion of” in translations of Anaxagoras. This divergence
has had the unfortunate effect of tending to hide from English-speaking
readers that Plato is taking over a straightforward notion from his
predecessor.
It is also
possible to understand sympathetically the claim that forms have a
greater reality than sensible particulars. The claim is certainly not
that the sensible realm fails to exist or that it exists only partially
or incompletely. Rather, sensibles are simply not ontologically or
explanatorily basic: they are constituted
of and explained by more fundamental entities, in Plato as in
Anaxagoras (and indeed in most scientific theories). It is easy to
multiply examples in the spirit of Plato to illustrate that adequate
accounts of many of the fundamental entities he is interested in cannot
be given in terms of sensible particulars or sensible properties. If
someone who wishes to define beauty points at Helen, he points at a thing both beautiful (physically) and not beautiful (perhaps morally). Equally, if he specifies a sensible property
like the gilded, he captures together things that are beautiful and
things that are not. Sensible particulars and properties thus exhibit
the phenomenon that Plato calls “rolling around between being and
not-being”: they are and are not x for values of x he
is interested in (beautiful, just, equal, and so on). To understand
beauty properly, one needs to capture something that is simply
beautiful, however that is to be construed. The middle dialogues do not
undertake to help the reader with this task.
Notice finally that because Plato was concerned with moral and aesthetic properties
such as justice, beauty, and goodness, the Anaxagorean interpretation
of participation—the idea that sensible composites are made up of
physical portions of the fundamental entities—was not available to him.
There is no qualitatively identical material constituent
that a lyre gains as its sound becomes more beautiful and that Achilles
loses as he ages. Plato’s theory of forms would need a new
interpretation of participation if it was to be carried out.
Forms as perfect exemplars
According to a view that some scholars have attributed to Plato’s middle dialogues,
participation is imitation or resemblance. Each form is approximated by
the sensible particulars that display the property in question. Thus,
Achilles and Helen are imperfect imitations of the Beautiful,
which itself is maximally beautiful. On this interpretation, the “pure
being” of the forms consists of their being perfect exemplars of
themselves and not exemplars of anything else. Unlike Helen, the form of
the Beautiful cannot be said to be both beautiful and not
beautiful—similarly for Justice, Equality, and all the other forms.
This
“super-exemplification” interpretation of participation provides a
natural way of understanding the notion of the pure being of the forms
and such self-predication sentences as “the Beautiful is beautiful.” Yet
it is absurd. In Plato’s theory, forms play the functional role of universals,
and most universals, such as greenness, generosity, and largeness, are
not exemplars of themselves. (Greenness does not exhibit hue; generosity
has no one to whom to give; largeness is not a gigantic object.)
Moreover, it is problematic to require forms to exemplify only
themselves, because there are properties, such as being and unity, that
all things, including all forms, must exhibit. (So Largeness must have a
share of Being to be anything at all, and it must have a share of Unity
to be a single form.) Plato was not unaware of the severe difficulties
inherent in the super-exemplification view; indeed, in the Parmenides and the Sophist he became the first philosopher to demonstrate these problems.
The first part of the Parmenides
depicts the failure of the young Socrates to maintain the
super-exemplification view of the forms against the critical examination
of the older philosopher Parmenides. Since what Socrates there says
about forms is reminiscent of the assertions of the character Socrates
in the middle dialogues Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic, the exchange is usually interpreted as a negative assessment by Plato of the adequacy of his earlier presentation. Those who consider the first part of the Parmenides
in isolation tend to suppose that Plato had heroically come to grips
with the unviability of his theory, so that by his late period he was
left with only dry and uninspiring exercises, divorced from the exciting
program of the great masterpieces. Those who consider the dialogue as a
whole, however, are encouraged by Parmenides’ praise for the young
Socrates and by his assertion that the exercise constituting
the second part of the dialogue will help Socrates to get things right
in the future. This suggests that Plato believed that the theory of
forms could be developed in a way that would make it immune to the
objections raised against the super-exemplification view.
Forms as genera and species
Successful development of the theory of forms depended upon the development of a distinction between two kinds of predication.
Plato held that a sentence making a predication about a sensible
particular, “A is B,” must be understood as stating that the particular
in question, A, displays a certain property, B. There are ordinary
predications about the forms, which also state that the forms in
question display properties. Crucially, however, there is also a special
kind of predication that can be used to express a form’s nature. Since
Plato envisaged
that these natures could be given in terms of genus-species trees, a
special predication about a form, “A is B,” is true if B appears above A
in its correct tree as a differentia or genus. Equivalently, “A is B”
has the force that being a B is (part of) what it is to be an A. This
special predication is closely approximated in modern classifications of
animals and plants according to a biological taxonomy.
“The wolf is a canis,” for example, states that “wolf” appears below
“canis” in a genus-species classification of the animals, or
equivalently that being a canis is part of what it is to be a wolf (Canis lupus).
Plato’s
distinction can be illustrated by examples such as the following. The
ordinary predication “Socrates is just” is true, because the individual
in question displays the property of being just. Understood as a special
predication, however, the assertion is false, because it is false that
being just is part of what it is to be Socrates (there is no such thing
as what it is to be Socrates). “Man is a vertebrate,” understood as an
ordinary predication, is false, since the form Man does not have a
backbone. But when treated as a special predication it is true, since
part of what it is to be a human is to be a vertebrate. Self-predication
sentences are now revealed as trivial but true: “the Beautiful is
beautiful” asserts only that being beautiful is (part of) what it is to
be beautiful. In general one must be careful not to assume that Plato’s
self-predication sentences involve ordinary predication, which would in
many cases involve problematic self-exemplification issues.
Plato was interested in special predication as a vehicle for providing the real definitions
that he had been seeking in earlier dialogues. When one knows in this
way what Justice itself really is, one can appreciate its relation to
other entities of the same kind, including how it differs from the other
virtues, such as Bravery, and whether it is really the whole of Virtue
or only a part of it.
By
means of special predication it is possible to provide an account of
each fundamental nature. Such accounts, moreover, provide a way of
understanding the “pure being” of the forms: it consists of the fact
that there cannot be a true special predication of the form “A is both B
and not-B.” In other words, special predication sentences do not
exhibit the phenomenon of rolling around between being and not being.
This is because it must be the case that either B appears above A in a
correct genus-species classification or it does not. Moreover, since
forms do not function by being exemplars of themselves only, there is
nothing to prevent their having other properties, such as being and
unity, as appropriate. As Plato expresses it, all forms must participate
in Being and Unity.
Because
the special predications serve to give (in whole or in part) the real
definitions that Socrates had been searching for, this interpretation of
the forms connects Plato’s most technical dialogues to the literary
masterpieces and to the earlier Socratic dialogues. The technical works
stress and develop the idea (which is hinted at in the early Euthyphro)
that forms should be understood in terms of a genus-species
classification. They develop a schema that, with modifications of
course, went on to be productive in the work of Aristotle and many later
researchers. In this way, Plato’s late theory of the forms grows out of
the program of his teacher and leads forward to the research of his
students and well beyond.
Works individually described
As
noted above, studies of both content and style have resulted in the
division of Plato’s works into three groups. Thus, (1) the early, or
Socratic, dialogues represent conversations in which Socrates tests
others on issues of human importance without discussing metaphysics; (2)
the middle dialogues, or literary masterpieces, typically contain views
originating with Plato on human issues, together with a sketch of a metaphysical
position presented as foundational; and (3) the late dialogues, or
technical studies, treat this metaphysical position in a fuller and more
direct way. There are also some miscellaneous works, including letters,
verses attributed to Plato, and dialogues of contested authenticity.
Early dialogues
The works in this group (to be discussed in alphabetical order below) represent Plato’s reception of the legacy of the historical Socrates; many feature his characteristic activity, elenchos,
or testing of putative experts. The early dialogues serve well as an
introduction to the corpus. They are short and entertaining and fairly
accessible, even to readers with no background in philosophy. Indeed,
they were probably intended by Plato to draw such readers into the
subject. In them, Socrates typically engages a prominent contemporary
about some facet of human excellence (virtue) that he is presumed to
understand, but by the end of the conversation the participants are
reduced to aporia. The discussion often includes as a core component a
search for the real definition of a key term.
One
way of reading the early dialogues is as having the primarily negative
purpose of showing that authority figures in society do not have the
understanding needed for a good human life (the reading of the Skeptics
in the Hellenistic Age). Yet there are other readings according to which the primary purpose is to recommend certain views. In Hellenistic times the Stoics regarded emphasis on the paramount importance of virtue, understood as a certain kind of knowledge,
as the true heritage of Socrates, and it became foundational for their
school. Whether one prefers the skeptical or a more dogmatic
interpretation of these dialogues, they function to introduce Plato’s
other works by clearing the ground; indeed, for this reason Plato’s
longer works sometimes include elenctic episodes as portions of
themselves. Such episodes are intended to disabuse the naive, immature,
or complacent reader of the comfortable conviction
that he—or some authority figure in his community—already understands
the deep issues in question and to convince him of the need for
philosophical reflection on these matters.
The Apology
represents the speech that Socrates gave in his defense at his trial,
and it gives an interpretation of Socrates’ career: he has been a
“gadfly,” trying to awaken the noble horse of Athens to an awareness of
virtue, and he is wisest in the sense that he is aware that he knows
nothing. Each of the other works in this group represents a particular
Socratic encounter. In the Charmides, Socrates discusses temperance and self-knowledge with Critias
and Charmides; at the fictional early date of the dialogue, Charmides
is still a promising youth. The dialogue moves from an account in terms
of behaviour (“temperance is a kind of quietness”) to an attempt to
specify the underlying state that accounts for it; the latter effort
breaks down in puzzles over the reflexive application of knowledge.
Yannis Simonides performing excerpts from his one-man show, Socrates Now, …Courtesy of Northwestern University (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
The Cratylus
(which some do not place in this group of works) discusses the question
of whether names are correct by virtue of convention or nature. The Crito
shows Socrates in prison, discussing why he chooses not to escape
before the death sentence is carried out. The dialogue considers the
source and nature of political obligation. The Euthydemus shows Socrates among the eristics (those who engage in showy logical disputation). The Euthyphro
asks, “What is piety?” Euthyphro fails to maintain the successive
positions that piety is “what the gods love,” “what the gods all love,”
or some sort of service to the gods. Socrates and Euthyphro agree that
what they seek is a single form, present in all things that are pious,
that makes them so. Socrates suggests that if Euthyphro could specify
what part of justice piety is, he would have an account.
The more elaborate Gorgias considers, while its Sophist
namesake is at Athens, whether orators command a genuine art or merely
have a knack of flattery. Socrates holds that the arts of the legislator
and the judge address the health of the soul, which orators counterfeit
by taking the pleasant instead of the good as their standard.
Discussion of whether one should envy the man who can bring about any
result he likes leads to a Socratic paradox: it is better to suffer
wrong than to do it. Callicles
praises the man of natural ability who ignores conventional justice;
true justice, according to Callicles, is this person’s triumph. In the Hippias Minor, discussion of Homer
by a visiting Sophist leads to an examination by Socrates, which the
Sophist fails, on such questions as whether a just person who does wrong
on purpose is better than other wrongdoers. The Ion considers professional reciters of poetry and develops the suggestion that neither such performers nor poets have any knowledge.
The interlocutors in the Laches are generals. One of them, the historical Laches, displayed less courage in the retreat from Delium (during the Peloponnesian War)
than the humble foot soldier Socrates. Likewise, after the fictional
date of the dialogue, another of the generals, Nicias, was responsible
for the disastrous defeat of the Sicilian expedition because of his
dependence on seers. Here the observation that the sons of great men
often do not turn out well leads to an examination of what courage is.
The trend again is from an account in terms of behaviour (“standing fast
in battle”) to an attempt to specify the inner state that underlies it
(“knowledge of the grounds of hope and fear”), but none of the
participants displays adequate understanding of these suggestions.
The Lysis
is an examination of the nature of friendship; the work introduces the
notion of a primary object of love, for whose sake one loves other
things. The Menexenus purports to be a funeral oration that Socrates learned from Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles (himself celebrated for the funeral oration assigned to him by Thucydides, one of the most famous set pieces of Greek antiquity). This work may be a satire on the patriotic distortion of history.
The Meno
takes up the familiar question of whether virtue can be taught, and, if
so, why eminent men have not been able to bring up their sons to be
virtuous. Concerned with method, the dialogue develops Meno’s problem:
How is it possible to search either for what one knows (for one already
knows it) or for what one does not know (and so could not look for)?
This is answered by the recollection theory of learning. What is called learning is really prompted recollection; one possesses all theoretical knowledge
latently at birth, as demonstrated by the slave boy’s ability to solve
geometry problems when properly prompted. (This theory will reappear in
the Phaedo and in the Phaedrus.) The dialogue is also famous as an early discussion of the distinction between knowledge and true belief.
The Protagoras, another discussion with a visiting Sophist,
concerns whether virtue can be taught and whether the different virtues
are really one. The dialogue contains yet another discussion of the
phenomenon that the sons of the great are often undistinguished. This
elaborate work showcases the competing approaches of the Sophists
(speechmaking, word analysis, discussion of great poetry) and Socrates.
Under the guise of an interpretation of a poem of Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–c. 468 bce),
a distinction (which will become thematic for Plato) is made between
being and becoming. Most famously, this dialogue develops the
characteristic Socratic suggestion that virtue is identical with wisdom
and discusses the Socratic position that akrasia (moral weakness) is impossible. Socrates suggests that, in cases of apparent akrasia, what is really going on is an error of calculation: pursuing pleasure as the good, one incorrectly estimates the magnitude of the overall amount of pleasure that will result from one’s action (see above Happiness and virtue).
Middle dialogues
These
longer, elaborate works are grouped together because of the similarity
in their agendas: although they are primarily concerned with human
issues, they also proclaim the importance of metaphysical inquiry and
sketch Plato’s proprietary
views on the forms. This group represents the high point of Plato’s
literary artistry. Of course, each of Plato’s finished works is an
artistic success in the sense of being effectively composed in a way
appropriate to its topic and its audience; yet this group possesses as
well the more patent literary virtues. Typically much longer than the
Socratic dialogues, these works contain sensitive portrayals of
characters and their interactions, dazzling displays of rhetoric and attendant suggestions about its limitations, and striking and memorable tropes and myths, all designed to set off their leisurely explorations of philosophy.
In
the middle dialogues, the character Socrates gives positive accounts,
thought to originate with Plato himself, of the sorts of human issues
that interlocutors in the earlier works had failed to grasp: the nature
of Justice and the other virtues, Platonic love, and the soul (psyche).
The works typically suggest that the desired understanding, to be
properly grounded, requires more-fundamental inquiries, and so Socrates
includes in his presentation a sketch of the forms. “Seeking the
universal” by taking forms to be the proper objects of definition
was already a hallmark of the early dialogues, though without attention
to the status and character of these entities. Even the middle works,
however, do not fully specify how the forms are to be understood (see above The theory of forms).
At the party depicted in the Symposium, each of the guests (including the poets Aristophanes and Agathon)
gives an encomium in praise of love. Socrates recalls the teaching of
Diotima (a fictional prophetess), according to whom all mortal creatures
have an impulse to achieve immortality.
This leads to biological offspring with ordinary partners, but Diotima
considers such offspring as poetry, scientific discoveries, and
philosophy to be better. Ideally, one’s eros (erotic love) should progress from ordinary love objects to Beauty itself. Alcibiades concludes the dialogue by bursting in and giving a drunken encomium of Socrates.
The Phaedo
culminates in the affecting death of Socrates, before which he
discusses a theme apposite to the occasion: the immortality of the soul
(treated to some extent following Pythagorean and Orphic precedent). The dialogue features characteristically Platonic elements: the recollection theory
of knowledge and the claim that understanding the forms is foundational
to all else. The length of this work also accommodates a myth concerning the soul’s career after death.
In the very long Republic, Socrates undertakes to show what Justice
is and why it is in each person’s best interest to be just. Initial
concern for justice in the individual leads to a search for justice on a
larger scale, as represented in an imaginary ideal city (hence the
traditional title of the work). In the Republic the rulers and guardians
are forbidden to have private families or property, women perform the
same tasks as men, and the rulers are philosophers—those who have
knowledge of the Good
and the Just. The dialogue contains two discussions—one with each of
Plato’s brothers—of the impact of art on moral development. Socrates
develops the proposal that Justice in a city or an individual is the
condition in which each part performs the task that is proper to it;
such an entity will have no motivation to do unjust acts and will be
free of internal conflict. The soul consists of reason, spirit, and appetite, just as the city consists of rulers, guardians, and craftsmen or producers.
The middle books of the Republic contain a sketch of Plato’s views on knowledge
and reality and feature the famous figures of the Sun and the Cave,
among others. The position occupied by the form of the Good in the
intelligible world is the same as that occupied by the Sun in the
visible world: thus the Good is responsible for the being and
intelligibility of the objects of thought. The usual cognitive condition
of human beings
is likened to that of prisoners chained in an underground cave, with a
great fire behind them and a raised wall in between. The prisoners are
chained in position and so are able to see only shadows cast on the
facing wall by statues moved along the wall behind them. They take these
shadows to be reality. The account of the progress that they would
achieve if they were to go above ground and see the real world in the
light of the Sun features the notion of knowledge
as enlightenment. Plato proposes a concrete sequence of mathematical
studies, ending with harmonics, that would prepare future rulers to
engage in dialectic, whose task is to say of each thing what it is—i.e.,
to specify its nature by giving a real definition. Contrasting with the
portrait of the just man and the city are those of decadent types of personality and regime. The dialogue concludes with a myth concerning the fate of souls after death.
The first half of the Phaedrus consists of competitive speeches of seduction. Socrates repents of his first attempt and gives a treatment of love as the impulse to philosophy: Platonic love, as in the Symposium, is eros, here graphically described. The soul
is portrayed as made of a white horse (noble), a black horse (base),
and a charioteer; Socrates provides an elaborate description of the
soul’s discarnate career as a spectator of the vision of the forms,
which it may recall in this life. Later in the dialogue, Socrates
maintains that philosophical knowledge is necessary to an effective
rhetorician, who produces likenesses of truth adapted to his audience
(and so must know both the truth concerning the subject matter and the
receptivities of different characters to different kinds of
presentation). This part of the dialogue, with its developed interest in
genera and species, looks forward to the group of technical studies. It
is also notable for its discussion of the limited value of writing.
Late dialogues
The Parmenides
demonstrates that the sketches of forms presented in the middle
dialogues were not adequate; this dialogue and the ones that follow spur
readers to develop a more viable understanding of these entities. Thus,
the approach to genera and species recommended in the Sophist, the Statesman, and the Philebus (and already discussed in the Phaedrus) represents the late version of Plato’s theory of forms. The Philebus proposes a mathematized version, inspired by Pythagoreanism and corresponding to the cosmology of the Timaeus.
But Plato did not neglect human issues in these dialogues. The Phaedrus already combined the new apparatus with a compelling treatment of love; the title topics of the Sophist and the Statesman, to be treated by genus-species division, are important roles in the Greek city; and the Philebus is a consideration of the competing claims of pleasure and knowledge to be the basis of the good life. (The Laws,
left unfinished at Plato’s death, seems to represent a practical
approach to the planning of a city.) If one combines the hints (in the Republic) associating the Good with the One, or Unity; the treatment (in the Parmenides) of the One as the first principle of everything; and the possibility that the good proportion and harmony featured in the Timaeus and the Philebus are aspects of the One, it is possible to trace the aesthetic and ethical interests of the middle dialogues through even the most difficult technical studies.
The Theaetetus considers the question “What is knowledge?” Is it perception,
true belief, or true belief with an “account”? The dialogue contains a
famous “digression” on the difference between the philosophical and
worldly mentalities. The work ends inconclusively and may indeed be
intended to show the limits of the methods of the historical Socrates
with this subject matter, further progress requiring Plato’s distinctive
additions.
The Parmenides is the key episode in Plato’s treatment of forms. It presents a critique of the super-exemplification view of forms that results from a natural reading of the Symposium, the Phaedo, and the Republic and moves on to a suggestive logical exercise based on a distinction between two kinds of predication
and a model of the forms in terms of genera and species. Designed to
lead the reader to a more sophisticated and viable theory, the exercise
also depicts the One as a principle of everything (see above The theory of forms).
The leader of the discussion in the Sophist is an “Eleatic stranger.” Sophistry seems to involve trafficking in falsity, illusion,
and not-being. Yet these are puzzling in light of the brilliant use by
the historical Parmenides (also an Eleatic) of the slogan that one
cannot think or speak of what is not. Plato introduces the idea that a
negative assertion of the form “A is not B” should be understood not as invoking
any absolute not-being but as having the force that A is other than B.
The other crucial content of the dialogue is its distinction between two
uses of “is,” which correspond to the two kinds of predication
introduced in the Parmenides. Both are connected with the genus-species model of definition that is pervasive
in the late dialogues, since the theoretically central use of “is”
appears in statements that are true in virtue of the relations
represented in genus-species classifications. The dialogue treats the
intermingling of the five “greatest kinds”: Being, Sameness, Difference,
Motion, and Rest. Although these kinds are of course not species of
each other, they do partake of each other in the ordinary way. The Statesman discusses genus-species definition in connection with understanding its title notion.
The Timaeus concerns the creation of the world by a Demiurge, initially operating on forms and space
and assisted after he has created them by lesser gods. Earth, air,
fire, and water are analyzed as ultimately consisting of two kinds of
triangles, which combine into different characteristic solids. Plato in
this work applies mathematical harmonics to produce a cosmology. The Critias is a barely started sequel to the Timaeus; its projected content is the story of the war of ancient Athens and Atlantis.
The Philebus develops major apparatuses in methodology and metaphysics.
The genus-species treatment of forms is recommended, but now
foundational to it is a new fourfold division: limit, the unlimited, the
mixed class, and the cause. Forms (members of the mixed class) are
analyzed in Pythagorean
style as made up of limit and the unlimited. This occurs when desirable
ratios govern the balance between members of underlying pairs of
opposites—as, for example, Health results when there is a proper balance
between the Wet and the Dry.
The very lengthy Laws
is thought to be Plato’s last composition, since there is generally
accepted evidence that it was unrevised at his death. It develops laws
to govern a projected state and is apparently meant to be practical in a
way that the Republic was not; thus the demands made on human
nature are less exacting. This work appears, indirectly, to have left
its mark on the great system of Roman jurisprudence.
Varia
The Epigrams
are elegiac couplets attributed to Plato. Epigrams 1–3 are especially
interesting: they may well be authentic, and if so they would give a
glimpse into Plato’s personal affections. Correspondence purporting to
be from Plato is collected as the Letters or Epistles; their authorship is controversial, and each must be evaluated separately. The Seventh Letter contains much that is relevant to Plato’s biography and to his joint project with Dion of Syracuse, as well as a criticism of putting philosophy into writing.
Three dialogues of uncertain authorship in the Socratic genre are the following. The Alcibiades
depicts Socrates with the brilliant title character, whose meteoric
career (before the date of composition but after the fictional date of
the dialogue) contributed to the resentment against the older man. In
the Clitophon, the title character objects that Socrates has
awakened his wish for knowledge of virtue but has failed to help him
reach his goal. The Hippias Major takes up the question “What is the beautiful (the fine)?” Widely agreed to be spurious are Axiochus, Definitions, Demodocus, Epinomis, Eryxias, Halcyon, Hipparchus, Minos, On Justice, On Virtue, Rival Lovers, Second Alcibiades, Sisyphus, and Theages.
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- aesthetics (in aesthetics: The contributions of the ancient Greeks)
- dance (in Western dance: Dance in Classical Greece) (in dance criticism: Early views of dance)
- mimesis (in mimesis)
- appearance (in appearance)
- ethics (in ethics: Plato)
- language (in philosophy of language: Skepticism)
- portrayal by Raphael (in Raphael (Italian painter and architect): Last years in Rome)
