William

Ancient Philosophy

Plato

A typical product of 5th century bc athenian society. With a relative openness to debate and education of young people down the streets, wise persons and the other at the gymnasia.

There is a clear emphasis on competition, on being the best, agonis. Agon means strive, or competition in sports. Plato is the example par exellence and the first that makes the competition into a competition of words. Very often you will see that the imagery of physical beauty is transposed to beauty of the soul. So there may be a kind of sexuality involved between master and pupil as is referenced in the Symposium. The emphasis is put on philosophical context, of an exchange of minds. Plato transposes this to the context of education, or the meaning he himself gives to the term.
Isocrates, a teacher in rhetoric, is the one that invents the term philosophia in the Lycaeum. A striving for expertise. Plato transforms this meaning and makes it mean the strive or the eagerness to become wise. The desire for wisdom, keeping open the desire, as the gods don’t philosophise. They have wisdom already, they have access to the ideas. What humans have as a plus over against the gods is that we have this desire.

Collytus is the theme, the district, which Plato comes from. His mother actually descends from Solon. Plato is also extremely rich. One of the reasons why he had his hands free to do philosophy is because he didn’t have to work. It is not a coincidence that Plato has the status that he has. And his family is also deeply involved in the dictatorship.

There are two temples to aphrodite, one of ouranon and one of all people. Plato plays on this distinction in the Symposion in that there is one love of the general people and then of a love for heavenly knowledge.

In Phaidros they walk outside of the city walls close to a temple of the nymphs. This is apparently important.

Where they found the academy, the name comes from an old hero called Hecademos, where Plato bought a bunch of land and founded his school. Lykeion is a gymnasium outside of town, and as Aristotle was not a citizen he had no right of property, and had to establish the school outside of town, in Likeion, Lycaeum. In Lysis Socrates is said to be walking to Lykeion before this was Aristotle’s school.

Plato founded his academy in 383 or something like that. Initially there was a lie that Plato was born in 428, but this is a lie to make him sound more apollonic. What we do know is that Plato was not a soldier in the pelopenesian war. You would have expected Plato to have been mobilised if he was old enough, so he must have been younger than 20 during the war. So maybe around 424.

383 was a date during which he had been in Sicily and met Dionysios II, a tyrant who was only interested in power, and who wanted to be taught power by Plato. Plato hated him.

He was already publishing dialogues at this time. You found traces of the education in the academy in the later dialogues. In the academy you needed to learn, mathematics, astronomy, geology, politics, musical theory, and so on. Very influenced by pytagorean tradition. In Plato’s terminology you also have to learn basic science which for him is called dialectics.

Dialectics is born out of the dialogue and discussion he was taught by Socrates. Philosophy happens in a dialogue, and who agree on certain points based not on persuasion but on their own reasoning.

All of Plato’s works, except for the Apology and the Letters (which may be inauthentic, at least all except letter 7; they narrate about Syracuse and Dionysius II), are not treatises explaining Plato’s views. What you have is a discussion, which doesn’t clearly explain his own opinion. It is for the first time that someone claims to be a philsopher and who refuses to tell us what is actually going on in his mind. And that may just be the exact meaning of philosophy. It is just presenting the tools on which you can be brought to reflect on a certain problem. Though there is a kind of tension between the searching attitude and a kind of system building.

The academy in Athens ended up being basically skeptic after Plato’s death. It became a philosophy that intentionally refrained from making claims about reality; emphasising the searching attitude, and the provisional character of knowledge.

NeoPlatonists look for a system in the platonic dialogues. They abstract from the dialogues a theory and a doctrine that is fully established without any doubts, very differently from skepticism. So this tension remains throughout the reading of Plato.
Cosmology will later be a kind of derived knowledge from the ethical and political questions in Plato. Most people probably see Plato as a mix between dialogical and doctrinal, but people emphasise both sometimes more or less.

There is also a comedian called Plato, Platon Comicus.

There is also a distinction between the platonic unwritten and written doctrines. If one’s true scientific method is dialogue, why should you commit that writing to paper?

Aristotle criticises Plato for having unwritten doctrines, agrapha dogmata. There is a theory then that Plato had a system in mind which was never written down which was only taught to the inner circle of the academy. The details of the theory was reserved to those within.

Then there is a student of Aristotle, called Aristoxonos, who wrote on music. He was a gossiper. He tells how Plato once made a public lecture on the Good, and it was a lecture on the One, the dyad, and lots of other things no one understood. Plato was actually giving an insight into his unwritten doctrines. If you really want to get to know Plato, believe Aristoxonos and you will find hints to these doctrines.
There is an explicit text of Plato in which he refers to this. Derrida writes of the Pharmacy of Plato. This is the Phaedrus. Plato refers to the god Thoth, the god who made all the good of humanity, and one of those goods is writing. Hieroglyph actually means sacred signs. But in fact writing introduces only forgetfullness because people do not put their trust in their own ability of memory but rather onto the thing outside which helps them to remember. You only end up communicating external knowledge, and direct dialogue between two people becomes impossible. Dialogue ’writes’ knowledge into the soul. Plato expresses that writing is not the best way of communicating thought. Those people who believe in the unwritten doctrines, say that this is obvious evidence that writing is a deteriorated way of communicating thoughts to anyone. Writing exteriorises the memory, but once the reminder is gone, you’re entirely lost.

The writers of letters 7 and 2, there is no writing of Plato’s ever, but it says rather that all Plato’s writing was written by Socrates. In letter 7 it says that you should never make the mistake of committing what you really thought to writing.

Tübingen, and later Milan, there were proponents of the theory that you have to extract from Plato was is called a theory of principles. And then they have a hierarchy of those principles which they refer to in the dialogues. But if you say that the dialogues are just a deteriorated version of what Plato wanted to say, then why do we have them? And if we are going to look for unwritten doctrines in the dialogues, then they are obviously written, it’s just about trying to extract them.

Plato may have thought in Phaedrus that if he writes a dialogue, it may expose the movement of thought as it does in discussion, without it actually being a discussion, and keeping the philosophical movement as it is supposed to. ’Writing is bad, but we have nothing better to communicate over generations’.

Plato himself is a bit of a historian, in the sense that whatever he writes is located in the period of Socrates’ life. One generation before Plato basically. In this sequence of things there is a kind of chronology. In the dialogue named Parmenides Socrates is very young, and Parmenides criticises the world of ideas in a heavy manner. There were no ideas in Socrates’ philosophy most likely, and most certainly not when he was 20, so this is an obvious fiction, but even in the fiction there are some chronological references. Same in Timaeus, we have a discussion directly after the republic, which recapitulates that discussion. Then most dialogues give no clue to the chronology. In 30ce, Plato died in 347-8 bce, a certain Thrasillus, a member of the academy, made an addition to Plato which was to put the dialogues into an order based on theme. He put 4 dialogues together based on their content. So everything about Socrates’ death we have the tetralogy. There are always basically tetralogies in his ordering. It makes no sense in terms of chronology or doctrine, because the Phaido would be with Apology, but these are very different.

Based on a new methodology which was introduced in the 1950s, called stylogology, which was made up of classicists who didn’t care about the content, but only how Plato says things. Only the structural elements of the Greek he writes. We know then that Laws is Plato’s last work. It is very clear that this work did not get a final redaction that it would have needed. All of these stylistic elements are inventorised and the dialogues are compared with Laws. You then find a kind of stylistic growth from the earliest dialogues to the latest. One of the objections of this is that an author could be going back and forth between styles based on the kind of dialogue Plato wanted to write at the time. It seems however that this method has fit very well. The most uncontroversial thing to say now is that there are three periods to Plato’s writing, early, middle and late.

Two pivotal innovations to Plato’s thought.

• Discovery of the immaterial/intelligible

• Consistent theory of the soul

He thinks that if you use what Parmenides discovered, the it is, it must be of a completely different nature to that of visible reality. You are studying rather general immaterial species and genera of the world as you find it. If you study gravity or any other aspect of cosmology you are dealing with an immaterial view of reality which you can apply to the world of the senses. The sciences still speak in many ways the language of Plato. Probably Socrates has been going in this direction already, but Socrates probably doesn’t have these theories that Plato espouse.

In regards to soul, he argues much like the Pythagoreans, that what you do in life has a bearing on how you will behave once you have to choose for the next life. If in your previous life you were too attached to a body, you will immediately reattach to a new body without choosing because your soul cannot stand being without one.

The main thing Plato is known for is the elaboration of a political system which is subservient to attaining the other goals. If you want knowledge of the intelligible world you need a political system which allows people to attain it. People need a moral education to reach these goals.

Plato’s uneasiness in that in the democracy as it operates in Athens, every single adult free man, are allowed to say whatever they like in regards to governance of the state. There is a very specific problem with allowing people to speak up about things they have no knowledge about, and this is an enromous moral risk for Plato. We have no way of assessing which moral attitude is the right one, and with this comes the ability to be led astray. The problem with moral education is that it is not founded on knowledge, but on opinion, doxa. Opinion can be right, but it is no more than an opinion. If you encounter a sophist or a populist you may easily be led astray by their persuasion because the word is a mighty ruler. People may start to change their beliefs by being manipulated by cunning speakers. If you want a good moral attitude to be transmitted, you need to have real knowledge. This is why Plato distinguish Doxa and Episteme. They belong to different powers of our soul, and also to different objects. The powers of the soul are the things that make moral choices, and you have to be aware that you are directed to the right objects, the intelligible objects. There needs to be something more secure than just volatile opinions.

True knowledge will never be accessible to everyone. You need some kind of specialisation, and one of the ideas of a platonic state, is that everyone has their very own task. Leave the making of tissues and of fabrics to the ones who know how to do that. If you give each their own, then you have justice in place. The just state gives each their own contribution to the functioning of the state. So you need some kind of education through which to specialise your rulers, the guardians, the one’s who guard the integrity of the state. They need other people to help them, helpers, in order to defend the state from within and without. Then you need a kind of supply, who are really good at makin supply, and that is the handiworkers. ie. there are three classes: guardians, helpers, and handiworkers. Each class has a corresponding virtue, in order: understanding, courage, and moderation. This is however not a caste society. You don’t become what you parents bore you as. There are some people who work as scouts who recognise who is good at what, and you make them happy by allowing them to do what they are good at. Once someone in a farmer’s family is born, they don’t necessarily have to become a farmer again, they may instead be a ruler instead if that is what they are good at. In Plato’s state, it is the philosophers who are rulers. Not because they are philosophers, but because they are capable of doing philosophy. Take someone like Alcibiades, he was very educated, but really did not have the character to be a good ruler, would have been removed from the class of guardians. Because everyone does what they are supposed to, the encompassing virtue of society will as such be justice. The class of guardians will need wisdom of course, but they will also need a lot of virtue. Justice is closer to a determination as a just way of giving to each their own for the functioning of the state. The result of this is finally that of just deeds. The point is that in this system, the handiworkers obediance to the commands of the guardians is not for Plato as submission, but voluntary action, because some others know better what is to be done. It is rather supposed to be voluntary cooperation based on rational insight. If a guardian were to say that the way in which a baker grinds the flour is altered, the baker will say mind your own business – because everyone has their own business. If a guardian ends up being bad at their job, they have to be put into another class. Plato doesn’t seem to believe that moral operations exist before the state, rather he thinks that your moral attitude comes from your place in the state. The system is often criticised for being totalitarian, but is usually less vulnerable to that criticism than many believe.

The unity of virtue in Plato. If you have the Virtue, you’ll end up basically having all the traits that are virtuous.