Read the following article on Plato.
Students took each central idea and wrote how it was a good idea and also how it was a bad idea.
The Great Philosophers
1: Plato
Athens, 2400 years
ago. It’s a compact place: around 250,000 people live here. There are fine
baths, theatres, temples, shopping arcades and gymnasiums. Art is flourishing,
and science too. You can pick up excellent fish down at the harbor in Piraeus.
It’s warm for more than half the year.
This is also home to
the world’s first true – and probably greatest – philosopher: Plato.
Born into a prominent
and wealthy family in the city, Plato devoted his life to one goal: helping
people to reach a state of what he termed:
εὐδαιμονία
Eudaimonia: this peculiar but fascinating Greek word is
a little hard to translate: it almost means ‘happiness’ but is really closer to
‘fulfillment’, because ‘happiness’ suggests continuous chirpiness – whereas
‘fulfilment’ is more compatible with periods of great pain and suffering –
which seem to be an unavoidable part even of a good life.
How did Plato propose
to make people more fulfilled? Four central ideas stand out in his work.
Think
harder
Plato proposed that
our lives go wrong in large part because we almost never give ourselves time to
think carefully and logically enough about our plans. And so we end up with the
wrong values, careers and relationships. Plato wanted to bring order and
clarity to our minds.
He observed how many
of our ideas are derived from what the crowd thinks, from what the Greeks
called ‘doxa’, and we’d call ‘common-sense’. And yet repeatedly, across the 36
books he wrote, Plato showed this common-sense to be riddled with errors,
prejudice and superstition. Popular ideas about love, fame, money or goodness
simply don’t stand up to reason.
Plato also noticed how
proud people were about being led by their instincts or passions (jumping into
decisions on the basis of nothing more than ‘how they felt’), and he compared
this to being dragged dangerously along by a group of blindfolded wild horses.
As Freud was happy to
acknowledge, Plato was the inventor of therapy, insisting that we learn to
submit all our thoughts and feelings to reason. As he repeatedly wrote, the
essence of philosophy came down to the command to:
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
‘Know yourself.’
2. Love More Wisely
Plato is one of the great theorists of
relationships. His book, The Symposium, is an attempt to
explain what love really is. It tells the story of a dinner party given by
Agathon, a handsome poet, who invites a group of his friends around to eat,
drink and talk about love.
The guests all have
different views about what love is. Plato gives his old friend Socrates – one
of the main characters in this and all his books – the most useful and
interesting theory. It goes like this: when you fall in love, what’s really
going on is that you have seen in another person some good quality which you
haven’t got. Perhaps they are calm, when you get agitated; or they are
self-disciplined, while you’re all over the place; or they are eloquent when
you are tongue-tied.
The underlying fantasy
of love is that by getting close to this person, you can become a little like
they are. They can help you to grow to your full potential.
In Plato’s eyes, love
is in essence a kind of education: you couldn’t really love someone if you
didn’t want to be improved by them. Love should be two people trying to grow
together – and helping each other to do so. Which means you need to get
together with the person who contains a key missing bit of your evolution: the
virtues you don’t have.
This sounds entirely
odd nowadays when we tend to interpret love as finding someone perfect just as
they are. In the heat of arguments, lovers sometimes say to one another: ‘If
you loved me, you wouldn’t try to change me.’
Plato thinks the
diametric opposite. He wants us to enter relationships in a far less combative and
proud way. We should accept that we are not complete and allow our lovers to
teach us things. A good relationship has to mean we won’t love the other person
exactly as they are. It means committing to helping them become a better
version of themselves – and to endure the stormy passages this inevitably
involves – while also not resisting their attempts to improve us.
3. The Importance of beauty
Everyone – pretty much
– likes beautiful things. But we tend to think of them as a bit mysterious in
their power over us and, in the greater scheme, not terribly important.
But Plato proposed
that it really matters what sorts of houses or temples, pots or sculptures you
have around you.
No one before Plato
had asked the key question: why do we like beautiful things?
He found a fascinating reason: we recognize in them a part of ‘the good’.
There are lots of good
things we aspire to be: kind, gentle, harmonious, balanced, peaceful, strong, dignified.
These are qualities in people. But they are also qualities in objects. We get
moved and excited when we find in objects the qualities we need but are missing
in our lives.
Beautiful objects
therefore have a really important function. They invite us to evolve in their
direction, to become as they are. Beauty can educate our souls.
It follows that
ugliness is a serious matter too, for it parades dangerous and damaged
characteristics in front of us. It encourages us to be like it: harsh, chaotic,
brash. It makes it that much harder to be wise, kind and calm.
Plato sees art as
therapeutic: it is the duty of poets and painters (and nowadays, novelists,
television producers and designers) to help us live good lives.
Plato believed in the
censorship of the arts. It’s not the paradox it seems. If artists can help us
live well, they can, unfortunately, equally give prestige and glamour to
unhelpful attitudes and ideas. Just being an artist doesn’t guarantee the power
of art will be wisely used.
That’s why Plato
believed that artists should work under the command of philosophers, who would
give them the right ideas and ask them to make these convincing and popular.
Art was to be a sort of propaganda – or advertising – for the good.
4. Changing society
Plato spent a lot of
time thinking how the government and society should ideally be.
He was the world’s first utopian thinker.
In this, he was
inspired by Athens’s great rival: Sparta. This was a city-sized machine for
turning out great soldiers. Everything the Spartans did – how they raised their
children, how their economy was organised, whom they admired, how they had sex,
what they ate – was tailored to that one goal. And Sparta was hugely
successful, from a military point of view.
But that wasn’t
Plato’s concern. He wanted to know: how could a society get better at producing
not military power but eudaimonia? How could it reliably help
people towards fulfillment?
In his book, The
Republic, Plato identifies a number of changes that should be made:
a) We need new heroes
Athenian society was
very focused on the rich, like the louche aristocrat Alcibiades, and sports
celebrities, like the boxer Milo of Croton. Plato wasn’t impressed: it really matters
who we admire, for celebrities influence our outlook, ideas and conduct. And
bad heroes give glamour to flaws of character.
Plato therefore wanted
to give Athens new celebrities, replacing the current crop with ideally wise
and good people he called Guardians: models for everyone’s good development.
These people would be distinguished by their record of public service, their
modesty and simple habits, their dislike of the limelight and their wide and
deep experience. They would be the most honored and admired people in society.
b) We need censorship
Today censorship makes
us anxious. But Plato was worried about the wrong sort of freedom: Athens was a
free-for-all for the worst opinion-sellers. Crazy religious notions and sweet
sounding, but dangerous, ideas sucked up mass enthusiasm and lead Athens to
disastrous governments and misguided wars (like a fateful attack on Sparta).
Continuous exposure to
a storm of confused voices was – Plato thought – seriously bad for us, so he
wanted to limit the activities of public orators and dangerous preachers. He
would – nowadays – have been very skeptical about the power of mass media.
c) Better Education
Plato believed
passionately in education, but wanted to refocus the curriculum. The primary
thing we need to learn is not just math or spelling, but how to be good: we
need to learn about courage, self-control, reasonableness, independence and
calm.
To put this into
practice, Plato founded a school called The Academy in Athens, which flourished
for over 400 years. You went there to learn nothing less than how to live and
die well.
It’s fascinating and
not a little sad how modern academic institutions have outlawed this ambition.
If a student showed up at Oxford or Harvard universities today seeking to be
taught how to live, the professors would call the police – or the insane asylum.
d) Better Childhoods
Families try their
best. And sometimes children strike lucky. Their parents are well balanced,
good teachers, reliably mature and wise. But pretty often parents transmit
their confusions and failings to their children.
Plato thought that
bringing up children well was one of the most difficult (and most needed)
skills. He was acutely sympathetic to the child who is held back by the wrong
home environment.
So he proposed that
many children would in fact be better off if they could take their vision of
life not from their parents but from wise guardians, paid for by the state. He
proposed that a sizeable share of the next generation would be brought up by people
more qualified than their own parents.
