Plato: 79 (Very Short Introductions)
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nobody else can know things for you or on your behalf. Knowledge requires that you acquire the relevant belief for yourself.
Philosophy aims only at the truth, not at mere persuasion regardless of truth, which is a dubious enterprise in both its intentions and its methods. (Recall the jury’s problem in Chapter 1.) Perhaps Plato
For Plato, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. Only in an ideal world could we do better, and live not merely alongside one another but together, with shared lives and ideals.
Socrates identified the philosophical life as one of continuing enquiry and investigation, into others’ beliefs and one’s own. Plato was profoundly impressed by Socrates’ insistence on putting enquiry before doctrine, and the search for understanding before ambitious claims.
Plato is suspicious of the very idea of dramatic representation. He thinks, as have puritans in a number of traditions, that acting parts makes the actor’s own self weak and pliable. Moreover, he distrusts the effect of drama on the audience; it encourages them to feel serious emotions lightly, weakening their control over their own emotions.
The Timaeus was seen as central to Plato’s metaphysical thinking until the 19th century, when obsession with Plato’s political thinking replaced it by the Republic, still Plato’s most frequently read work. As often with Plato, both works are important, and point up different aspects of his thinking in ways that encourage both unification and contrast.
And finally, the Timaeus makes prominent one of Plato’s most famous ideas, that the real world is not, as we uncritically take it to be, the world around us that our senses report to us; the real world is rather what we grasp in thought when exercising our minds in abstract philosophical argument, in particular arguments which lead to what Plato calls Forms.
One of his most notorious views, one that has recommended him to puritans in every age, is his rejection of the idea of harmless entertainment. For him the appeal of a good story is valuable if it encourages us to think of, and think further about, good values; otherwise it is harmful, since it encourages us to feel satisfied with the unquestioned values of our culture.
He stresses the mentoring aspect of the lover– beloved relation, elevating it to an idealized relation between teacher and pupil which is above physical attraction and consists in concern for the other’s soul – that is, their psychological and mental well-being. This is what is often labelled ‘Platonic love’ – love with the form of a romantic relation, but transformed by concern with the soul rather than the body.
Plato made two momentous decisions. He rejected his family and civic duty of marrying and producing heirs. (Modern readers are unsurprised that Plato never married, because his writings seem so obviously homosexual in temperament. But in ancient Athens marriage was a duty for the continuance of the family and the city, and had nothing to do with personal sexuality. In not marrying, Plato was giving up having posterity of his own, a great loss in his society.)
As Plato sees it, democracy is a menace because it rejects the idea that society should be directed by expertise, and thus blocks changes that would encourage people to think less individualistically. It drags gifted people down to the lowest level of shared understanding. On the other hand, in the world as it is, the bureacracy and splitting-up of power that democracy encourages do prevent abuse of power by uncontrolled, misguided individuals who merely think that they are experts.
So we can see why some have thought of Plato as the first feminist, because he sees no reason why women should be barred from activities that men do, while others have seen in him a deeply anti-feminist strain, holding that women are worth thinking about only to the extent that they can be socially reconstructed as men. Considering the difficulty of the issue, and the way that feminism tends to divide on the subject of whether traditionally feminine activities and traits should be rejected or valued, we can appreciate why Plato sends mixed messages here.
Plato’s God is a workman who does the best he can with the materials he has to work with; he creates order from chaos, but he does not create the original materials from nothing. (An already long tradition in Greek philosophy held that creation from nothing was an incoherent idea.) As a result, Plato does not face the ‘problem of evil’ troubling the Judaeo-Christian tradition; if God creates the world from nothing, then why does he create evil as part of it? Plato’s God is a creator in the way a craftsman is; he makes the product, which is an excellent one, but he is not responsible for the effects of ‘Necessity’, the unavoidable defects of the materials.
Plato’s Republic, and to a lesser extent Laws, are famous for the idea that in an ideally governed society the nuclear family would be either abolished or severely limited. Plato is struck by the way that families often serve as schools of selfishness and a competitive and hostile attitude to outsiders, and that this often closes off the spread of attachment to wider groups. Cities will have citizens with real attachment to their city and its ideals, he thinks, only if the kind of influences provided within the nuclear family are reined in. Among the benefits of this idea he sees a release of the potential in women, who will exchange a narrow life of caring for husband and children at home for one in which their physical and mental capacities can be developed in wider contexts, just as those of men are.
Plato goes further, and is notoriously hostile to the fictions popular in his culture, mainly taking the form of publicly performed drama and recitation. He is aware of the power that such narratives have to shape our conceptions of ourselves and of the social world we live in. He is strongly against such power when used thoughtlessly to propagate traditional ideas, which can be harmful. In the Republic especially, Plato makes the case that the traditional cultural education of his time leaves people with false beliefs about the gods and false ideals to live up to. The stories found in Homer and the ancient dramatists (which played the role taken in our society by popular entertainment) glamorize the values of a warrior society, and are bound to unfit people for living in civic society, where they must act in co-operation with others.
One irony here is that in terms of sheer numbers of people affected, probably the most influential thing Plato ever wrote was his unfinished story of Atlantis, in the introduction to Timaeus and the fragment Critias. He begins a narrative about ancient Athens, which embodied an ideal form of government, and a threatened invasion by Atlantis, a rich, sophisticated civilization to the west of the known Greek world. Atlantis itself was originally Utopian also, but it is flawed, in ways that lead it to seek imperialist conquest. Even the beginnings of this story have inspired a genre of Utopian writing, as well as romances, action stories, and movies about exotic outsiders threatening ‘our’ civilization. (Most of these are cruder than Plato’s, which offers its readers no easy identification with ‘the good guys’, and no straightforwardly optimistic ending.)
The second impressive point about mathematics is quite simply its objects. When we learn Pythagoras’ theorem, we are grasping something in our thinking, which is not made true (or false) by the particular diagrams we draw to illustrate it; any irregularities in these are irrelevant to the mathematical truth. Although it is not to be encountered in the world of experience, it is certain; having proved it, we know it to be true. It is clear that Plato was deeply impressed by this feature of mathematics: not only can we be certain of the results we prove, we realize that it is only by exercising a certain kind of abstract thinking that we can understand them. We learn that the evidence of our senses may be irrelevant to the results we can prove in thought, which may even conflict with them. For Plato this is the beginning of philosophical wisdom, the right way to think for ourselves about things.
No other ancient philosopher rejects popular religion to this extent, and it is no surprise that ancient Christian thinkers found Plato by far the most congenial of the pagan philosophers. His concern with ordinary people’s beliefs about God, or the gods, was as important to them as his insistence that God, or the gods, are good, and in no way evil. Yet there is a barrier separating Plato from later Jews and Christians who took over much of his thought, and in particular spent huge amounts of energy in trying to assimilate the Timaeus to the creation story in Genesis. 10. The Christian God as Plato’s Craftsman. The Timaeus was very influential in the Middle Ages. In this illustration from the first half of the 13th century, God the Father designs the world using compasses, which were employed in the contemporary building trade. Here the Judaeo-Christian creation story is clearly seen in terms of Plato’s divine Craftsman producing our world by imposing mathematical order on unruly materials.
The School of Athens, painted for the library of Pope Julius II. This picture of ancient philosophy is heavily influenced by the revival of Platonism in the Renaissance, and dominated by the figures of Plato, who holds the Timaeus and points upwards, while Aristotle, holding his Ethics, looks at Plato’s upraised hand but also gestures outwards. The contrasting gestures indicate that Aristotle is more concerned to understand the world around us in terms of philosophical principles, while Plato is more austerely focused on the abstract and theoretical principles themselves. In the fresco there is great stress on the Timaeus’ mathematization of the world’s underlying structure. Plato is shown between Pythagoras and Euclid, and his features are not those of the ancient portrait busts, but those of a contemporary mathematician, Leonardo da Vinci. In the Renaissance, Plato was also important as the philosopher most influential on Christianity. On the wall opposite, Raphael’s depiction of the Trinity is greatly influenced by contemporary Neo-Platonic writers. Saint Justin, a Platonist philosopher of the 2nd century AD, who converted to Christianity and was martyred, repeats Plato’s upward gesture as he points towards the Incarnation. In Pope Julius’ scheme, the highest achievement of pagan philosophy r <Você alcançou o limite de recortes para este item>
Plato’s idea that God is good, and produces only good, is one that alienates him decisively from popular religion. He never rejects the forms and practices of the religion he knew, but he develops a theology which is radically at odds with most people’s understanding of that religion. In the Republic he insists that the gods are responsible only for good, and accepts that in a well-organized society this will require a radical censorship of most of the popular stories that people tell about the gods. (As we have seen, Plato does not care about suppressing people’s creative and imaginative thinking, in this case about the divine.) In the Laws, he goes further. Although public religion remains that of an ordinary Greek city-state, repressive measures are introduced that have no parallel in the ancient pagan world. Citizens are to have no private shrines or worship of their own; the standard public rites are to be the only ones they take part in. And it matters not just what they do but what they believe; all citizens are to believe that there really are gods, that these gods care for humans, and that they cannot be bribed to overlook wrongdoing. Citizens who deny these beliefs are to be re-educated, or, if unpersuadable, executed. Plato is unique among ancient philosophers in holding it important for everyone to have the right beliefs about God (or the gods) and for these beliefs prominently to include the belief that God is responsible only for good, not for evil.