Introduction to the Philosophy of Plato

Plato's philosophy went through a number of stages. As a pupil of Socrates, he began as an analytical and possibly skeptical philosopher. However, throughout his life he became increasingly influenced by Eastern philosophy and its representatives at Athens, the Pythagoreans, and this took him towards mysticism, and towards number mysticism in particular.

A number of recurring themes can be seen in Plato's work: (1) a belief in the immortality of the soul; (2) a rejection of empiricism, represented in Athenian culture at the time by the Sophists; (3) hostility towards the body and sense experience and a belief that virtuous living depends on reason; (4) an attempt to discover the purpose of existence, both for man as an individual and for the world as a whole; (5) a defence of the aristocratic form of government.

The body/soul distinction is introduced in his dialogue The Phaedo but it is later modified in The Phaedrus. In this latter dialogue he puts forward the doctrine of the tripartite soul. The soul, which is originally not connected with a body, has three parts, each corresponding to a certain style of living and psychological orientation. He used the image of a charioteer and two horses to illustrate this. The charioteer represents reason. The better of the two horses is allied to “spirit” which here does not denote another name for the soul, but rather refers to that style of life which is orientated towards the pursuit of fame and honour, particularly in battle. The bad horse is associated with appetite, instinct and desire. The presence of “spirit” complicates and obscures the basic dualism in this scheme. It is included because it was traditional in Greek society to admire martial valour, but Plato has placed the life of reason above this. The dualism is a dualism of reason against appetite and to live a good life is to reject appetite, instinct and desire and the temptation of physical things in favour of reason and the contemplative life.

Appetite allies itself with the body and reason with the soul, but strictly the division of appetite and reason exists in the soul and it is only by giving way to appetite that man falls into association with the body. Thus Plato advances the Pythagorean doctrine that originally man existed as a disembodied soul and became incarnate because he fell from this original state of grace. This makes Plato the originator of the philosophical doctrine of the fall of man, reflected in either a literal or allegorical fashion in Genesis. The Phaedrus offers no real explanation for why man should have fallen. We are told that in a 10,000 year cycle all souls follow the Gods in an attempt to catch a direct experience of the ultimate Form of the Good, and in striving upwards many souls fail and fall, that is, give way to desire and thereby become incarnate. This could be interesting psychology along the lines of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde [In Robert Louis Stevenson's story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the good doctor, Dr. Jeckyll, invokes his own evil shadow side, Mr. Hyde, by striving too hard to be good.], but it does not answer the question of why man should fall. For the main part Plato takes the fall of man as a given fact, and on the assumption that we are fallen, argues that in order to escape the cycle of birth and death, we must devote ourselves to the life of reason. Plato also comes to reject a crude divide between reason and desire. There is such a thing as rational desire, and the aim of moral training is to channel our desire from physical things to intellectual objects. The same life force operates throughout but it must be canalized towards higher things. This doctrine is referred to as the “streams of desire”, and it is from this that we obtain the concept of sublimation.

Since there is a continuum of lifestyles ranging from the life of pure reason, enjoyed by the Gods, down to a life governed wholly by appetite, such as is experienced by animals, it follows that there is in life a “chain of being”. That is to say, spirit beings are arranged into a spiritual hierarchy and those who are higher up the scale have a natural right to govern those below them, to impose laws and set moral standards and enforce them by means of coercion and censorship. People higher up the chain are born into the aristocracy, so the aristocracy has a natural and even divine right to rule.

In Plato's earlier philosophy there is an outright hostility to anything to do with the body and especially sexual desire. However, by the time of writing The Phaedrus he has come to realize that desire operates in every style of life and he advocates the need to sublimate desire from lower to higher objects. Since desire to be acquainted with the Form of the Good is natural, it follows that an apparent descent into appetitive urges can, in special circumstances, be a gateway to sublimation. This is particularly the case when an older man becomes enraptured by the beauty of a younger man. Even an homosexual act may be justified in this context and both The Symposium and The Phaedrus argue this point.

Empiricism is the doctrine that all our knowledge is abstracted from sense experience. If this were the case, there would be no need to postulate the existence of a spiritual, higher world, though perhaps there would still remain an unsolved problem of consciousness. Plato sees it as imperative to refute empiricism. In reply to empiricism he uses the problem of universals. Drawing on the work of Socrates, who challenged his opponents when the claimed to know anything, by asking for definitions and exposing these as inadequate, Plato claimed that our knowledge of general terms could not be abstracted from particular experiences. This is a logical point and is best approached through the consideration of general terms like “red”, “house” or “pillar box”, but Plato usually discusses the problem in relation to what we might call second order predicates and general terms such as “beauty”, “justice” and “goodness”. The most successful exposition of his ideas in this respect is found in the Theaetetus, which concentrates on the purely logical points. Although the problem of universals has tended to be ignored by contemporary Western philosophers it remains the pre-eminent problem for empiricism. The difficulty is that our knowledge of general terms possesses a universal characteristic that could not be derived from any one particular experience, or collection of particular experiences. When we judge that an object is red, we embrace in that judgement that one red object is like other red objects, and that similarity is not a property of any particular object; it is a property that applies to a whole class of objects. We have knowledge both of particulars and the structure or form of experience. It is this form that cannot be abstracted from particulars. This problem remains the major difficulty for empiricism, and in one form or another (such as Kant's notion of the synthetic a priori) it is the only real objection to it.

Plato's logical point regarding universals is an important issue in itself, but he goes on to attempt a construction of morality and teleology on this bases. He claims that all forms are themselves arranged into a hierarchy, and that every form participates in some way in the Form of the Good. In his later theology, found in the Timaeus, Plato claims that the visible world was fashioned by a “demi-urge” into the likeness of the Form of the Good. Whilst this in a sense represents Plato's increasing rapprochement with the visible world (in that it is by this stage accepted as being in the likeness of the Form of the Good), the logical connection between form as structure and form as ideal must be questionable, and the desire to make that connection seems to be motivated by considerations that lie outside the logic of what universals might be. Plato had rejected the visible world as a realm of change and mutability whereas he regards the realm of forms as abstract, that is outside space and time, and hence unchanging and eternal. This motivates him to equate forms with ideals, but such an equation is not strictly valid. Just because an object is abstract, it does not follow that it must be good. This equation of form with the ideal leads Plato into the further erroneous development of mysticism. He seems to suggest that there are some peculiar elevated states of mind in which the philosopher can obtain an extra-sensory experience of the Form of the Good. Mathematics and music are associated with his alleged state of mind, and this leads to the vagaries of number mysticism.

The postulating of a realm of forms may be motivated by logical considerations but there are problems associated with it nonetheless. The main problem is known as the problem of participation. How, in fact, does a form, which is abstract and eternal, become embodied in a particular? This problem can be solved, as in the work of Kant, by adopting the hypothesis of idealism, that is, both form and particular are mental objects, hence it is the mind that brings the two together. The other solution is to reject the existence of forms altogether. Plato did not consider idealism, and would not accept the materialism (or equivalent monism) that the rejection of forms would imply, so the problem of participation remains a difficulty in his work. It is illustrated by his own dialogue, The Parmenides, in which Parmenides poses a younger Socrates a problem involving an infinite regress. If the form is postulated to explain the similarity between all particulars (for example, all men), what then explains the similarity between the form and the particulars? If we postulate a third form we will be lead to an infinite regress. This is called “the third man argument”. However, as it was Plato himself who posed the problem we may infer that he had a solution to it. The regress only exists if the relationship between the form and the particular is one of resemblance, so obviously this implies that the particular does not resemble the form, and that the relationship of participation is not one of resemblance, but some other relationship.

Since Plato claims that our knowledge of generality is based on our knowledge of forms, he is led to the question: how and when did we obtain knowledge of the forms? Since the realm of forms is abstract and our acquaintance with it is one of understanding and intellection, he could argue that we have a direct acquaintance with this realm and that no other explanation is required. However, the question chimes too well with his other beliefs about man's fallen state. He claims that our knowledge of the forms is only possible if we are recollecting them from a previous experience. Since this experience could not be located in temporal experience (that is, experience that we have had since our birth) he is led to conclude that we must have pre-existed our birth and hence we must have become acquainted with the forms during this pre-existence. This fits well with the doctrine of the fall of man and is called the “doctrine of recollection”. In his dialogue, The Meno, Plato seeks to illustrate how all learning is just a form of recollection.

Whatever the logical problems of Plato's philosophy, he came to believe in the existence of a supra-sensible reality of forms, and that philosophical enquiry enables one to obtain knowledge of these forms. In his opinion, there are spiritual distinctions between people, and the higher up the chain of being you are, the more aware you are of the forms and the ultimate supervening Form of the Good. Therefore, philosophers, who specialize in knowledge of forms, talk a different language to common people, and the common people do not understand philosophers nor their importance. In The Republic, in his allegory of the cave, Plato expresses imaginatively the plight of the philosopher. He depicts common people as prisoners in a dark cave. What they take to be real objects are the projections, by means of a fire, of other objects being carried along a wall behind them, which they cannot directly see. But these other objects are also not real objects, but objects made in the likeness of Forms. In order to “see” reality, the prisoners must leave the cave entirely and make their way into the outside world, whereupon they will be initially blinded by the light. After some time they will become accustomed to the outer world, but if that liberated prisoner were to return to the cave, the prisoners in the cave would not understand him, and he would also not be able to see. This analogy merely expresses the difficulty a philosopher has in communicating with common men and serves to justify the philosopher's use of coercion when governing common men.

A brief survey of the concepts introduced into Western thinking by Plato will serve to underline his importance: the body/soul divide; the immortality of the soul; the Fall of Man; the life of reason; the doctrine of reincarnation; the concept of sublimation; God as the absolute morality — the Form of the Good; the Chain of Being, the Divine Right of Kings, the problem of universals; number mysticism; the problem of participation; the third man argument; the doctrine of recollection among others. It is probable that Plato is the single most influential thinker of all time. His work provides a complete systematic explanation of man's situation in the cosmos, and it has captured the imagination of many of the greatest minds of the Western world. All the early Christian fathers were Platonists and his influence on the development of Christianity cannot be underestimated. The Gospel according to St. John begins with the words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” St. John wrote in Greek, and his term logos is the one we usually translate as “the Word”; it is the same term that Plato uses for Form, and in this way St. John equates Jesus Christ with “the Word” — that is, with the Form of the Good. This illustrates the impact Plato has had on Christian thinking.