Study Guide to The Republic and Other Works by Plato

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645423775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Plato, ancient Greek philosopher. Titles in this study guide include The Republic, Gorgias, Meno, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Phaedrus, Symposium, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.As a philosopher and poet during the Classical period, Plato created dialogue and dialect within philosophy. Moreover, he is considered the father of Western political philosophy. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Plato's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO PLATO: WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

Most philosophers believe that philosophy begins in wonder, and thus has its roots somewhere in human nature itself.

Men are probably the only creatures who can wonder. They can wonder at the “mystery of man’s existence” and at the fact that the world exists or, finding no such “mysteries,” can wonder about the nature of the world (whether it is material or spiritual, moving or still) and the nature of man’s knowledge of it.

Out of this wonder, two men in ancient Greece created philosophy as we know it today - as the systematic investigation of the ultimate nature of reality and of man’s relation to reality. If a man has ever wondered whether the world he sees around him is really real, he has been wondering about “the ultimate nature of reality.” If he has ever asked himself, “How can I ever be sure I know anything? I’ve been so sure before, and been wrong then. How can I know I’m right now?” or if he has ever asked himself, “Why should I be moral?” he has been asking about his “relation to reality.” Such a man has been asking philosophical questions. When he asks and answers such questions systematically, he becomes a philosopher.

(Even before philosophy came upon the scene, there must have been some Canaanite shepherds who asked questions such as: “What keeps the stars up?” and “What is the soul?” The difference between the way these questions are asked by Canaanite shepherds and Athenian philosophers is that the shepherds are idle in their questioning. It takes them nowhere. And when they cannot find an answer they give up wondering. When they do find an answer it is isolated from everything else they know.)

Can we say then what makes a great philosopher, the kind of philosopher we can read with profit today, though he wrote more than 2,000 years ago?

PLATO’S IMPORTANCE

Plato is often called “The Prince of Philosophy.” There are two reasons for this title. First because he asks many of the fundamental philosophical questions, questions that are still being asked by philosophers today. These are questions such as: What is truth? What is justice? What is reality? Modern philosophers might not answer these questions in the way the Plato answered them, but it is significant that, in any case, they are giving their modern solutions to his problems. No modern composer writes music like that of Bach, but no important composer can ignore him.

The second reason for Plato’s right to be called “The Prince of Philosophy” is, I think, that many of his answers have been continuously meaningful, and are still meaningful for us today. To his fundamental questions, Plato gives some of the best answers ever given. Each age rediscovers for itself Plato’s persistent value. Many of our contemporary advances in logic and the theoretical side of mathematics, for example, can be traced back to Plato. Alfred N. Whitehead, a famous mathematician and logician, as well as a deep thinker on the theory of the cosmos, can say something like, “Wherever I go in my mind, I always meet Plato coming back.”

Even if we disagree with Plato, as some great philosophers do, his ideas are so profound and so persuasively argued for that his opponents always have to be able to refute him. It is in these respects, therefore, that we might say that all of subsequent philosophy (and that includes the whole vast history of western thought, from Aristotle through the Middle Ages, through philosophy in our own time) can be accurately characterized as “a series of footnotes to Plato.”

PLATO’S BACKGROUND

Socrates, the man whom Plato idealized in his writings, lived and taught in the last half of the fifth century B.C. Plato studied under him but did his writing during the first half of the fourth century B.C. In the time of Socrates, Greek values and the Greek view of life were being attacked in a powerful way. In the time of Plato, those values were already dead: the Golden Age of Greek democracy was finished. It has been said that philosophy arises only when a culture finds its values threatened or when the culture itself is dying. “The owl of Minerva takes to flight only when the darkness has fallen,” says the German nineteenth-century philosopher, Hegel. He is speaking of Socrates. The Athenian Empire was in its death-throes, and people were asking themselves what it is that could really be believed. Evidently, the values they had trusted could be trusted no longer, for if they were true, why hadn’t they worked? What Socrates tried to do, therefore, was to establish such concepts as truth, justice, and reality, on a soberly rational and scientific basis, quite independently of all inherited traditions.

PLATO FOR OURSELVES

It is easy to find, in all this, many direct applications for our own time. We, too, live in a time when our values are under attack. We no longer trust our values in the same way that our forefathers did.

1. In political philosophy they could speak of truths which they held to be “self-evident,” namely that all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Some modern theorists want to retain such a concept as “rights,” but they do not necessarily want them to be dependent upon the actions of a creator. Other theorists attack the concept of a “right” if we take it to mean a “natural law” embedded in the very cosmos itself. Still others want to rule out the concept of “rights” and replace it with a concept of certain procedural advantages to be gained by acting “as if” men had rights. “Rights,” in other words, are not as “self-evident” as they were once taken to be.
2. In addition, modern science has completely overturned our picture of reality. When we can theorize about such peculiar sub-atomic particles as neutrinos that have no mass, only velocity (that is, they cannot be collected in a container, because as soon as you stop their motion they go out of existence), our trust in our own sense of a solid, stable reality may be shaken to its foundations. Now, when we combine our modern distrust in our traditional political values with our distrust for our ordinary interpretation of reality, we can see that our age is one in which many people no longer place the usual reliability in our grasp of things. It is an age of “humiliated thought,” as the modern French writer, Albert Camus, says.

Our problem, therefore, consists of a re-evaluation of values and a re-interpretation of reality. This same two-fold problem was faced by Plato. I have already mentioned Socrates’ (and Plato’s) attempt to establish political values on a rational and scientific basis. If, as the Greeks saw, other peoples held their own values with the same kind of conviction with which the Greeks held theirs, and even Greek values were undergoing change, then what values were real?

And the physical world, as well, came in for a drastic re-interpretation. Two earlier writers, Parmenides, and Heraclitus, had views that directly contradicted one another. Heraclitus held that all reality is undergoing constant change. Parmenides held that only what is unchanging is real; the world of our changing experience is therefore illusory. Plato resolves the conflict by showing that there is a gradation of realities, wherein the highest is the unchanging, and the lowest is the world of images, mirages, and changing illusions. The difference between Plato’s view and that of the earlier thinkers is that Plato has a more highly sophisticated theory of meaning, a theory in which words refer to the most real things, the pure forms or ideas - and these forms are, of course, more real than any concrete aspect of the world itself.

As to the re-evaluation of values, Plato’s attempt to establish these on a scientific basis requires us to ask whether a science of man (such as a science of politics or psychology) is at all possible. If, as we just saw, the world of change is an illusory world, and man is part of that illusory, changing world, then it would appear that a true science of man is impossible. Plato, however, will not leave it at that. He wants to find the conditions that actually make a human science possible. One of the most searching questions he asks, therefore, is, “How is a human science possible?” When Plato uses the word “science” he means something like mathematics, with its unchanging truths. Can there be such a science of man, a science that would give us absolute certainty, despite the facts of human change?

Thus, we find that our own re-evaluation of our culture’s values and our re-interpretation of reality are foreshadowed by Plato’s own problem: the problem of change. If cultural values change, what values are real? If the physical world is always changing, then what aspect of “reality” is real?

Comment

Plato has something to say about some other contemporary issues. (1) Many of the questions that are now being discussed by philosophers and psychologists were discussed first by Plato. The modern school of psychology known as Behaviorism finds itself confronted by “new” questions that received their most probing analysis by Plato. Is consciousness a brain-process? Is psychological behavior basically different from physical behavior? If there is no basic difference, does this mean that psychology is ultimately reducible to physiology and physics? Can psychological descriptions be translated into physiological descriptions?

This is a cluster of questions which carries the title of the “Mind-Body Problem.” Behaviorism and its philosophical foundation (Physicalism) form one set of answers to the problem: “mind” is reduced to “body”; there is only one kind of reality and it is physical. This might appear as the most obvious position to take. Yet it is a position that is riddled with difficulties, and it does not necessarily make for simplicity. Another way of approaching the problem is to retain the two-fold reality of mind and body. This view, a dualism, has also had its due treatment at the hands of Plato.

Some philosophers have tried to dismiss the problem as nothing but a question of semantics. Nevertheless, the problem comes back. Although it has not been resolved (and is perhaps insoluble), we must continue to ask these questions. The asking helps us turn up new insights into human nature - even though the problem persists as unsolved. The reason why we go back to Plato is that we might gain a fresh perspective and then start all over.

(2) Another broad area of concern in which Plato is being read is that of political theory. We may feel that democracy is the best form of government. But is this conviction of ours something which we can also establish theoretically? If we want to think of ourselves as complete human beings, functioning on all levels, then the feeling alone cannot suffice. Emotion cannot do the work of intellect. We have all seen the dangers involved when that sort of thing has been tried: vast crowds shouting, “Heil!”

Now, Plato thought that democracy is tragically inadequate as a form of government. He had excellent evidence for his view: Athens had been defeated after a long and deadly war. There is no question but that the democracy contributed to its own defeat. This is not, however, the substance of Plato’s indictment of democracy. His case is far more challenging - as we shall see. Perhaps, then, if we can withstand Plato’s attack we can find new “reasons,” new intellectual grounds for what we already hold true on the basis of feeling and loyalty and tradition.

(3) What Plato and philosophy ask of us, then, is that we put our beliefs on the line, and follow our thoughts no matter where they might lead. This is a kind of passion. After all, what intellectual passion and erotic passion have in common is the inescapable need to pursue an object to its conclusion - whether that object be an idea or a person. In this light, Plato is one of the most courageous and passionate of philosophers.

If we can rationally justify what we believe, then well and good. If we cannot, however, then we must bravely surrender our hold on our beliefs, and believe only that which we can satisfactorily prove to ourselves. This can be a very frightening prospect to many people. It is not every day that we are asked to show grounds for our beliefs or else give them up, to agree to defend them successfully (and Plato would make a powerful adversary) or else to run from the field of battle. Imagine what it would be, had we to do this as a way of life.

Socrates and Plato did, however, choose this as a way of life: endless questioning, taking hold of one’s beliefs and weighing them once again, each day. This choice had different consequences for each. For Socrates, the result was that he was condemned to death for doing just this - and we shall see how he freely chooses death rather than give up the pursuit of what his mind has shown him. (Perhaps, then, Erasmus is right, and there is enough nobility in this martyrdom for proper sainthood.) For Plato, the result was that he founded the first university in the world.

Something must be said now about the personal character of these two men, of their relation to one another, and of the time in which they lived. Let us begin, however, with a mystery.

THE SOCRATIC MYSTERY

Socrates, we know, never wrote a word. Practically all that we know of him is what we can gather from Plato’s descriptions of him in the Dialogues. (A book of reminiscences of Socrates by Xenophon, Memorabilia, some fragments from dialogues by Aeschines, and the lampoon of Socrates by Aristophanes in The Clouds contribute little to our picture of Socrates.) Our mystery is this: Is Plato presenting Socrates as he really was, as expressing ideas which were really his? Or is Plato using Socrates merely as a dramatic figure, a spokesman for views he never held? Is the Socrates of Plato’s Dialogues uttering the philosophy of Socrates or the philosophy of Plato? There are two schools of thinking about this problem.

THE ENGLISH VIEW

Plato’s representation of Socrates has to be a faithful one. The character in the Dialogues could not be a mere persona for the views of Plato, since the Dialogues were meant to be read and heard by people who had known Socrates well. Any deliberate mis-characterization would have been pointless - as pointless as writing a book called “Chats with Churchill” in which Churchill is represented as saying, “I always felt that a German victory would be the best thing for the world.”

THE GERMAN VIEW

The character of Socrates must be a construction of Plato’s to some extent since some of the Dialogues (such as Protagoras) present Socrates as a relatively young man, long before Plato was born. Other dialogues (such as Symposium) present Socrates in conversations which Plato was too young to have heard. Moreover, there is a significant change in some of the views of Socrates between Plato’s earlier and later works. Nor does this reflect a change in the actual Socrates, since some of the earlier Dialogues present an elderly Socrates, but with Plato’s early views!

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