Plato

by Roy Jackson

  For the Sophists, the laws of one society are no ‘truer’ than any other. Morality was a matter of the conventions of the society you live in. Later Sophists were more concerned with a desire to make money and winning arguments by whatever means. Socrates considered them to be nothing more than illusionists who could make people clever speakers but without possessing virtue or selflessness. During Socrates’ later years, the politicians in power practised the arts of sophistry, reflecting the general decline in moral standards in Athens at that time, but the ability to speak and to be able to argue for your side was crucial in Athenian society to the extent that your livelihood, and your life, could depend upon it. In democratic Athens, major decisions were made through debate, and reputations and positions of authority could be made or broken. A man’s property and very life could be decided upon in a court, depending upon not what evidence was supplied but on the defendant’s choice of advocate and their ability to persuade the court of his innocence.

  The Socratic method

  The dialogue style of writing is particularly associated with Plato’s work because it is in many ways unlike the writings of previous philosophers, which were usually either long treatises using technical language and the impersonal third-person or so poetic, ambiguous and abstract as to be difficult to comprehend the actual meaning. Having said that, Plato’s writings were also influenced by his predecessors, and there are similarities with them. Plato as a young man wanted to be a poet, and so we need to see his philosophical works as a blend of his enthusiasm for poetry, for the power of the word, with his philosophical quest for knowledge. Plato’s writings are works of drama as much as they are works of philosophy, and they are carefully crafted, with no ‘fluff’ or accidents. One approach to studying the works of Plato is to break down and analyse the logic contained within them, and this is very typical of the philosophical method known as analytic philosophy, but there is a danger that such analytic reductionism by necessity fails to see the whole; the importance of the drama, of the myth, the story, the irony, the ambiguity, the characters, that makes up the work. Plato uses dramatic techniques to draw the reader in, to invite you to speculate and reflect. Some of Plato’s works are more drama-driven than others, and if you wish to consider Plato at his literary best you could do no worse than starting with Phaedrus or Symposium.

  The leading character in his dialogues is usually Socrates and so they are often referred to as Socratic dialogues. Characters are created within a scene and engage in spontaneous conversation – not unlike a playwright would present his work. It is not surprising that Plato’s works are also considered great pieces of literature. Why did Plato adopt this form? In a way it was a tribute to his mentor, for Socrates always believed that knowledge came through conversation. Remember, he himself never wrote anything down, preferring the cut and thrust of lively discourse. For Plato to recreate the character of Socrates it made sense to present his words as a dialogue. In none of Plato’s works will you find soliloquy, the speaking of one’s thoughts to oneself, which you find in, for example, Shakespeare. By using the dialogue form, Plato himself is acknowledging the soundness of the Socratic method; the use of dialectic, to talk and to listen to get to the truth.

  In terms of how the dialogue is structured, Plato commonly uses the following approach. As an example taken from Euthyphro:

  • He begins with a simple question in which nothing is presumed. For example, in Euthryphro, Socrates, in his usual modest fashion, asks to be the ‘pupil’ of the much younger and somewhat naive Euthyphro. Socrates begins by asking: ‘Then tell me, how do you define piety and impiety?’

  • The question is then examined and definitions given. Euthyphro would go on to define what piety and impiety are: ‘What is agreeable to the gods is pious, and what is disagreeable to them impious.’

  • Assumptions are questioned. Here Socrates would then leap in and raise the further question as to whether we can assume that what the gods do is always right and also that the gods themselves seem in disagreement with this.

  • Conventional views are dismissed or redefined. Euthyphro, for example, adapts his definition: ‘I should say that piety is what all the gods love, and the opposite, what all the gods hate, is impiety.’

  Now Socrates, having forced Euthyphro to redefine what he meant by impiety, could well sit back and leave things at that, but, like the ‘gadfly’ that he is, he pushes on. Reading the dialogue you can sense Euthyphro’s growing unease and frustration as he is compelled to yet redefine again until, eventually, the original view of impiety bears no resemblance to the new definition. In the meantime, the conversation will have meandered along through all kinds of objections that could be either relevant or irrelevant to the original topic.

  Like the characters in a novel, each has his role to play. The characters were often taken from real life, but Plato would embellish them to bring out sharp contrasts; making them more bullish, arrogant, complacent, impatient, careless, assertive, aggressive, etc. than they actually were. This was necessary for dramatic effect, although it can result in making Socrates seem rather unreal at times – just a bit too ‘good’ to be believable. But every story must have its hero!

  Perhaps the best way to see the Platonic dialogues is as if it is a philosophy class, with, in most cases, Socrates as the most skilled in philosophy. However, the skilled philosopher does not – or, at least, should not – simply stand up and lecture while everyone else sits back, somewhat passively. Philosophy classes should be, very much, what in modern terms is referred to as ‘active learning’: all partake in doing philosophy and this is inevitably an intellectual struggle and hard work. The problem Socrates does have, on occasion – and this is something that philosophy teachers today can relate to – is that some participants are lazy, some aggressive, some simply refuse to listen, and some want to be told the answers rather than think for themselves. The Ancient Greeks were no different from human beings today in terms of their temperament.

  Socrates believed in the importance of conversation as a method to determine the truth of things. Through a careful process, involving defining terms, questioning those definitions, and then moving to a further definition, Socrates believed we could eventually reach a clear and unalterable definition for such things as ‘goodness’. This ties in with his belief that there actually can be one true understanding of goodness, unlike the Sophists who argued that ‘goodness’ is merely a relative term depending on the time and place. This may well not be achieved in a particular dialogue, but at least the interlocutors have struggled to get somewhere rather than simply sitting back and remaining unreflective.

  It could be argued that being taught the skill of persuasion, of getting on in life, of ‘how to win friends and influence people’ can, indeed, be a very useful skill to possess. This was true enough and the reason Socrates was usually associated with the Sophists is because he himself used the same techniques. However, an important difference is that Socrates said that his aim was to determine the truth of things, whereas many of the Sophists were not concerned with ‘truth’, or even believed that there was such a thing as truth: only persuasion. It was this ability in particular that worried Plato and Socrates: a Sophist could claim to persuade a sick man that he could heal him better than any doctor, but this does not make the Sophist’s medical skills actually better than a doctor’s, and nor would it benefit the patient to be treated by the Sophist, who lacks any medical knowledge, rather than the doctor.

  Being ‘clever’ could be used for good purposes, but it could also be used for bad purposes. You might consider a modern parallel with the ‘spin doctors’ in politics today whose primary purpose is to manipulate the perception of politicians and their policies so as to make them palatable to the public. A ‘clever’ Sophist could persuade the sick man to be healed by him, but this does not make him a good doctor either in the moral or technical sense. For both Socrates and Plato, the concern was to produce good people. Therefore, a good ruler s
hould be someone who was both virtuous and technically skilled to rule in the same way a doctor is both morally concerned to make his patients well and technically skilled to do so.

  And so, for Socrates as well as Plato, it was important to educate people in the truth. Inevitably this raises the question of what is truth. Right at the beginning of Meno, Socrates says he does not know whether goodness can be taught without first determining what goodness is. This is a sensible enough remark to make: you should understand what something is before you set out to teach it. Therefore, if we are to teach what is right to our young we must know for sure what is right. Here, to ‘know’ something is to be aware of the truth of something, and so differs from what we may call ‘opinion’.

  The scapegoat

  ‘I hope that there is something in store for the dead, and, as has been said of old, something better for the good than for the wicked.’

  Plato, Phaedo

  During Socrates’ latter years, the city of Athens was in decline. Its defeat by Sparta in 405 BC had been a massive blow to its confidence. The loss and subsequent ravaging of the land led the people of Athens to question what had gone wrong. Why had such a mighty power fallen? In seeking a scapegoat, the masses – led on, no doubt, by the politicians themselves who followed the prejudices and passions of the masses to gain support – blamed Socrates. He was deliberately provocative. It was for this reason Socrates jokingly referred to himself as a gadfly, biting away at his victims. However, this also resulted in making him many enemies. Athens, seeking security, returned to its old traditions, and saw in Socrates the man who most publicly questioned the belief in gods and the old ways, as well as ‘corrupting the youth’ with his ideas.

  When he was arrested Socrates could, like the Sophists, have gained the sympathy of the public through persuasion if he had wished, but he remained stubborn and resolute to the end. He neither sought sympathy nor forgiveness, for he believed he had done nothing wrong except to seek out the truth. He was condemned to death and he refused to escape or adopt the traditional method of proposing another form of punishment, such as exile (which probably would have been accepted), preferring to die with dignity and remain a good citizen of the state that he so dearly loved. In choosing his method of death he drank a cup of hemlock and died within half an hour. After his death, Socrates, in time, did become a new kind of Greek hero replacing the more militaristic figures such as Pericles. Socrates represented the person of conviction who follows the dictates of intellectual conscience and it was this legacy that Plato promulgated.

  ‘Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.’

  Socrates’ dying words in Phaedo by Plato

  Socrates’ Last Words

  Plato, in his dialogue Phaedo, describes Socrates’ last moments in his cell. Surrounded by a group of his followers (though Plato himself was not present) the cup of hemlock was handed to him by the tearful jailer: ‘Quite calmly and with no sign of distaste, he drained the cup in one breath.’ His followers broke down in tears while Socrates was the one who comforted them as the poison worked its way through his body. It was in these final moments that Socrates addressed one of his followers: ‘Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.’ Crito replied that it would be done and, when he asked if there was anything else, there was no reply; Socrates was dead. The meaning of these last words has resulted in a lot of ink in scholarly articles, for it seems somewhat mundane from such a great thinker; surely, many argue, there must be a deeper meaning? Asclepius, the god of healing, was a relatively new (for Athens) but very popular divinity. No doubt this god’s popularity was due to the recent high levels of death and suffering from the Peloponnesian Wars against Sparta and its allies. Perhaps, as Asclepius was able to raise people from the dead, Socrates also hoped for more life, although this seems odd given his welcoming of death in his speech to his followers. Or perhaps as he suffocates from the hemlock, he calls out to the god of healing to ease his pain. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (see Case Study in Chapter 12), in his work The Gay Science, argues that Socrates is giving thanks to the god of health for ridding him of the disease of life, but, again, this seems at odds with Socrates’ attitude towards life, which is far more positive than that! There are so many other explanations, all of which have equal weight, for we can never know the real reason. It may be simple piety on Socrates’ part, or a last stab at irony. In many ways, these final words represent the ambiguity that is Socrates himself: sometimes portrayed as a philosophical riddler and logician, while other times modest, down-to-earth and plain-spoken.

  Key terms

  Analytic philosophy: A method of doing philosophy that was particularly associated with English-speaking countries in the 20th century by which philosophical problems are examined through analysis of the terms in which they are expressed.

  Dialectic: A method of attempting to get to the nature of truth by questioning concepts. The Socratic method is a form of dialectic.

  Moral relativism: Relativism means that all things relate to a particular time and place. Moral relativism, therefore, is the belief that morality has no universal and absolute standards, but is relative to a time, place or person.

  Sophist/sophistry: A Sophist was, among other things, a relativist. Sophists were teachers who believed that there is no such thing as true knowledge. What is ‘true’ is what society believes or is persuaded to believe.

  Dig deeper

  Hughes, B. (2010), The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life. London: Jonathan Cape.

  Johnson, P. (2011), Socrates: A Man for Our Times. London: Penguin.

  Taylor, C. (2000), Socrates: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Tredennick, H. (trans.) (1990), Xenophon: Conversations of Socrates. London: Penguin.

  Tredennick, H. (trans.) (2003), Plato: The Last Days of Socrates. London: Penguin.

  Waterfield, R. (2009), Why Socrates Died: Dispelling The Myths. London: Faber & Faber.

  Wilson, E. (2007), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint. London: Profile Books.

  Fact check

  1 Which one of the following wrote about Socrates?

  a Xenophon

  b Xanthippe

  c Xanix

  d Xanadu

  2 Which Ancient Greek city is Socrates from?

  a Rome

  b Athens

  c Sparta

  d Metropolis

  3 What was the view of the Presocratic philosopher Democritus?

  a That the universe was created by the gods

  b That the universe is made of atoms and nothing else

  c That the universe consists of Platonic Forms

  d That the universe is just one of many universes

  4 Which one of the following describes the Sophists?

  a Citizens of a Greek city state that fought against Athens

  b Believers in an absolute moral standard

  c Believers in moral relativism

  d Wise men who sat on sofas

  5 Which following insect was used to describe Socrates?

  a A butterfly

  b A greenfly

  c A housefly

  d A gadfly

  6 How did Socrates die?

  a Died of old age while in exile

  b Died laughing

  c Died choking on wine

  d Died by taking poison

  7 Which one of the following best describes the Socratic method?

  a The use of dialectic

  b Writing books

  c Meditating silently

  d Library research

  8 In which century was Socrates born?

  a Third century BC

  b Fourth century BC

  c Fifth century BC

  d Sixth century BC

  9 What was the motto that Socrates adopted that was based on the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle?

  a Know n
o one

  b Know others

  c Know thyself

  d Know all there is to know

  10 Who said ‘Man is the measure of all things’?

  a Socrates

  b Aristotle

  c Pythagoras

  d Protagoras

  3

  Who was Plato?

  ‘Reading Plato should be easy; understanding Plato can be difficult.’

  Robin Waterfield, Republic

  As one of the founding fathers of philosophy, and the best known of the thinkers of Ancient Greece, Plato has had a massive impact on the history of Western thought. He lived from around 427–347 BC, spending most of his time in Athens. Curiously there are many biographies of Socrates, for whom we know so little, yet you will struggle to find works on the life of Plato, for whom we know more. Why this is the case is perhaps due to Socrates as something of a tragic figure, of a man who died for what he believed in. Yet we would know considerably less about Socrates if it were not for Plato who immortalized him in his dialogues.

  As we saw in the previous chapter, Plato is not the only source for Socrates’ philosophy, but this is a book about Plato’s philosophy rather than that of Socrates, although we will struggle to differentiate the two in terms of who said what. Rightly or wrongly, Plato has become synonymous with Socrates, much to the annoyance perhaps of other writers of Socratic dialogues.

  Antisthenes

  After the death of Socrates, a number of his followers began to write down their master’s philosophy. One of these was Antisthenes (c. 445–c. 365 BC) who, unlike Plato, was present at Socrates’ death. The ascetic Antisthenes was known as someone who baulked at pleasure, declaring: ‘I would rather go mad than have fun.’ To annoy Plato, Antisthenes wrote a satirical dialogue called Satho, which, though it rhymes with ‘Plato’, is actually Greek for ‘prick’!