Plato lived in Athens, Greece, 427-347 b.c. He is the first Western
philosopher who has left us a substantial body of his own writings. These
writings, almost all written in dialogue form, raise a great many of the issues
that subsequently occupied Western philosophers. (The modern British philosopher
A.N. Whitehead famously said the "the safest characterization of Western
philosophy is that it is a series of footnotes to Plato." See his Process and
Reality, Free Press, 1979. p. 39)
Plato also had an enormous influence on early and medieval
Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology. Beginning with Clement of Alexandria in the middle of the
second century, almost all of the most influential Christian thinkers were
Platonists, up until the thirteenth century when Thomas Aquinas refashioned
Christian theology on the basis of the thought of Aristotle, Plato's pupil.
Muslim thinkers preserved the Greek texts and thought of Plato and Aristotle
during the early middle ages, so that Aquinas learned Aristotle's thought from
the Muslim scholar Ibn Rushd (known in Europe as Averroes).
For Plato, "philosophy" was not yet an academic discipline,
but a way of life. Prior to the Eighteenth century Enlightenment period in
Europe, Platonism was mainly what we would call today a "personal spirituality"
for individuals wanting to raise their lives to a higher moral and spiritual
level than would be possible merely by conforming to the moral standards
prevalent in society at large. Platonism was the basis for a great deal of
traditional Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spirituality.
Plato's philosophical thought developed partly out of
disillusionment with Athenian politics of his time, partly also due to the
influence of Socrates whom he regards as his main teacher.
One source of Plato's disillusionment came from his observation of the
workings of Athenian democracy. As he saw it, democracy in practice made the
young men of Athens want to learn the skill of persuading and manipulating a
crowd ("how to please the voters," as we would say today), rather than serious
critical inquiry. A large part of the way Plato defines "philosophy" is
determined by contrasts between philosophy on the one hand, and crowd-pleasing
rhetoric on the other. A majority vote in a large Athenian jury sentenced his
teacher Socrates to death, whom he regarded as by far the best man in Athens
But his distrust of the Athenian masses was balanced by an
equally great distrust of aristocratic tradition. The key experience here came
about in connection with a war between Athens and a neighboring rival
city-state, Sparta. Sparta won the war and appointed thirty Sparta-sympathizers
among the Athenians to rule over Athens on their behalf. Among the thirty were
Plato's mother's brother and her cousin (Charmides and Critias). According to his account in his
Seventh Letter, Plato was initially tempted to accept his relatives' invitation to join
them in the new government, hoping that it would be much better than the
democracy he disliked. But, he says, it turned out to be much worse, and he was
glad he had not joined it. He was especially angry that they tried to involve
Socrates in some of their criminal acts.
Plato had one more try at political involvement, when he heard that the son of
the ruler of Syracuse, a Greek colony in present day Sicily, was interested in
his ideas and might make them the basis for governmental reform in that colony.
This too came to nothing.
It seems that it was as a result of these disillusioning
experiences in political life that Plato founded what came to be called the
Academy, the first institution in the Western world devoted to theoretical
learning ("philosophy") for its own sake. The Academy Plato founded lasted for
almost a thousand years, until it was suppressed by Christian Roman Emperors in
the middle of the sixth century A.D.
Socrates (469-399 b.c.), an Athenian from Plato's father's generation who
died when Plato was only 28, seems to have been the single greatest influence on
Plato's thinking. Socrates was not a professional "philosopher," but seems to
have spent much of his time trying to engage his fellow-Athenians in serious
thought about moral norms. Plato's pupil Aristotle says that Socrates was the
first to apply critical philosophical reasoning to moral questions.
Almost all of Plato's writings are written in the form of
dialogues between two or more individuals. In the majority of the dialogues
Socrates is the main speaker. Scholars have generally marked off nine of these
dialogues as early and "Socratic" in the sense that they exhibit a style of
moral questioning that seems to stem from Socrates himself (in contrast to
probably later dialogues in which "Socrates" seems to serve more as a mouthpiece
for some of Plato's own favorite ideas.) Plato also wrote a book now called "the
Apology" that presents itself as an account of the trial at which Socrates was
condemned to death for "corrupting the youth." At this historical distance, it
is very difficult to completely differentiate "the real Socrates" from the
character Socrates that appears in Plato's dialogues. For practical purposes, in
these essays, "Socrates" can be considered one character in Plato's
Socrates-plays (i.e. the dialogues written by Plato), an idealized example of
Plato's ideal Philosopher.
Plato's "Socrates" is a complex character. Two of his main traits might seem at first to be opposite to each other.
On the one hand, Socrates is an extremely skeptical thinker, devoted to undermining people's confidence in commonsense moral notions. At several points in Plato's writings, Socrates claims that he has no ideas of his own, that his only advantage over other people is just "knowing that he does not know."
On the other hand, Socrates is a man supremely confident in his own moral mission to the people of Athens where he lived. He claims that he is teaching the youth of Athens to each "care for his soul, that it might become its best" and that the health of their souls depends completely on cultivating moral virtue. He insists that he is questioning commonsense notions of virtue only so that they will be cultivating "true virtue" not just the "appearances of virtue."
Many of his fellow Athenian citizens saw him as doing the reverse, eventually bringing him to trial on the charge of "corrupting the youth." Plato's account of Socrates' speeches at this trial again shows that he is anything but skeptical about his own "divine" mission to teach Athenians to care for their own souls. He says that, if the jury was to pardon him on the condition that he cease this activity, he would die rather than accept this condition. And indeed he was condemned to death and is pictured as dying with complete confidence, at peace with his own conscience. This is not a man uncertain of his own moral ideals.
What is really unique about the character Socrates
as he appears in the Apology and in the Socratic dialogues is the way he
combines severe questioning of conventional moral beliefs with extreme personal
moral idealism. We are familiar today with radical questioning of all beliefs by
rational thinkers, but we usually associate this with a moral skepticism and
resultant sense of being free of moral obligations. In Plato's Socratic
Dialogues, Socrates' questioning likewise typically undermines people's
confidence in their knowledge of what is right and wrong, and in these
particular dialogues typically offer nothing positive to replace the knowledge
that he has shown to be inadequate. Yet he went to his death very serene in his
confidence that he personally knew what is right, and lived his life according
to this knowledge.
This combination of critical thinking and moral idealism is
something Plato himself tries to maintain in his own thought: Combining very
fundamental questioning with ultimate moral seriousness. One should subject all
moral opinions to severe criticism. But this critical
questioning must be in service to a search for reliable moral knowledge, not a
means of undermining belief that one can know what goodness is. Plato's
theory of Forms is a positive answer to radical questions raised by Socratic
questioning.
"Philosophy" for Socrates and Plato is not a purely
theoretical undertaking, done by professional philosophers for the sake of
improving our knowledge of reality-as-it-is. The ultimate aim is personal and
individual, to provide moral ideals for individuals to mold their characters on,
actually becoming better persons. "Caring for one's soul that it might become
the best it can" as Socrates says in the Apology.
*****
Pierre Hadot's What is Ancient Philosophy? discusses in detail the centrality of personal spirituality to the concept of philosophy in general, and Platonism in particular, from Plato's time down through the early middle ages. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Pr. 2002. see esp. p. ix-x,1-6). Frantisek Novotny's The Posthumous Life of Plato (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1977) reinforces this view in his comprehensive survey of virtually every thinker ever influenced in a major way by Platonism -- including for example numerous Christian "Church Fathers" as well as influential Islamic philosophers and theologians, for whom theology was intimately connected to personal spirituality.
Plato undoubtedly gives us an idealized account of his hero Socrates. Reading only Plato's Apology, one might think that the charge of "corrupting the youth" referred only to Socrates' habit of getting people to question things. But the actual situation was more complex. Plato's relatives Charmides and Critias mentioned above as two of the Thirty Tyrants, were also thought to have been former pupils of Socrates. So surely many members of the Athenian jury would have understood "corrupting the youth" to refer to the fact that he "corrupted" these two unsavory characters when they were young. I.F. Stone has written a book trying to tell the story from the Athenian point of view.