Jan 12, 1998 [Info] [Contents] [Welcome] [Syllabus] [Resources on Plato]
Athens took much of the credit for the victory of the Greeks over the Persians led by their Emperor Xerxes. Afterwards, they formed the Delian League, a coalition of allied city-states. Athens was a democracy with a written constitution; all free men, about 40,000, had a direct vote in the affairs of state--a direct democracy, unlike ours, where we pay representatives to vote for us. Credit for victory over the much larger Persian army was given to the fact that the Athenians fought because they chose to, while the Persians were forced. After the Persian War, Greece entered a "Golden Age." During the 5th and 4th centuries BC, fifteen of the world’s most influential geniuses could be found in Athens. The expansion of Athens posed a threat to the traditional leadership position of Sparta. Athens was a sea-power, while Sparta was a land power; Athens withdrew inside the city walls, but a plague cost 1/4 of the population. After 30 years of war, Sparta won, appointed a ruling council; after 4 years, Athens returned to democracy. Plato grew up during the defeat of Athens, and watched as Socrates was tried and executed.
With the expansion of a new money class, these nouveau riche wanted political power, but did not have the traditional family names needed for success. Children of the ancient families were trained at home by tutors, reading the traditional Greek poets. (The writings of these poets formed their counterpart to our Bible today.) As success in a democratic society depended on one’s ability to speak persuasively in public, Sophists appeared to fill the need of the new money class, who had neither the family name nor the education required for success, but did have money. Sophists taught skill in oratory and debate: How to win friends and influence people. They felt themselves to be enlightened, liberated from the ignorance of past traditional beliefs. This philosophy appealed to the new money class. Protagoras was a Sophist, famous for saying "Man is the measure of all things." He argued that the object of sense perception was a private, subjective state; the "brown" I see is radically different from the "brown" you see. As there is no public, objective reality "out there," each man’s opinion about what is real and true is equal to every other’s.
With the Sophist denial of a public, objective reality, their philosophy of law also denied that law was real; rather, they said, law results from convention, or agreement among men. According to this view, acts are not good or evil in themselves, but only if people decide to treat them as such. For example, there is nothing wrong with murder, except that our society condemns it and punishes those who are murderers. Callicles argued that sensual pleasure is the only good, so we should fill our lives with food, drink, and sex as much as possible in the time we have. Thrasymachus argued that "right" is whatever is in the interest of the stronger party: Might makes right. For example, in trying to gain a new ally during the Poloponnesian War, Athens told the citizens of the island of Melos that they could either join the Delian League or die; they refused, so the Athenians burned the city and sold the women and children into slavery. Most of the citizens of ancient Greece still held to traditional beliefs, and viewed Sophists as corrupters of traditional values. In their eyes, law came from God; thus treason against the state was equivalent with heresy against God, and violators were many times accused of both crimes indiscriminately.
Socrates wrote nothing. What we know of him came from the writings of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes. In Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, Socrates is portrayed as a fool. Plato’s picture has been the most widely accepted and influential. Plato was about 20 when Socrates was executed. Plato was in the courtroom when Socrates gave his defense. The Apology, one of Plato’s first dialogues, records Socrates’s argument in court. Besides the Peloponnesian War, this was the most important event in Plato’s life. Trying to separate what Socrates really believed and what Plato has him say in his dialogues is virtually impossible.
Socrates is considered the Father of Ethics, because he focused philosophy on study of the human condition rather than study of the cosmos, as the Pre-Socratic philosophers had done. Socrates would engage others in discussions, usually in search for the definition of abstract ideas such as piety, courage, or justice. Socrates would elicit a definition from his opponent, and then, by a series of relentless questions, would lead him into a contradiction, destroying his definition. The dialogues usually end without a satisfactory definition; thus they have a negative quality, not only because no answer is given to the problem, but also because his opponents would become frustrated or angry. Thus Socrates made many enemies, and it is not surprising that he was condemned to death; what is surprising is that he was allowed to live so long. Socrates was the son of a stone-mason; he was married to Xanthippe and had three sons. Plato described him as having a pug nose, ample belly, and bulging eyes. He lived in poverty, taking no money for practicing philosophy. Yet many people viewed him as another Sophist. This was the picture that Aristophanes gives us in his comedy The Clouds. He was tried and convicted in 399 BC for corrupting the youth and teaching false gods.
Scholars generally agree that Plato’s early dialogues give us the best picture of the real Socrates, but in his later dialogues Socrates disappears altogether. From this, a few ideas can be distilled that Socrates must have believed. The statement "The unexamined life is not worth living," is from his defense at his trial, recorded in Plato’s Apology. As Plato was present at the trial, it is very likely that these were his actual words. The practice of self-examination leads to discovery of truth within oneself, thus "The truth lies within each of us." What Socrates did was to lead his students to see the truth for themselves. This principle of active learning, the "Socratic Method," is still used today whenever the practice of answering questions and questioning answers is used. It is clear that Socrates’s mission was a call for people to give less regard for money, power, fame, and such, and to seek wisdom and virtue above all else. In order to become pious, we must first know what "piety" is. His belief that "No one does evil voluntarily" is preserved in our goals today of social reform, rehabilitation of criminals, and alleviation of poverty. Socrates believed, as opposed to the Sophists, that there are objective principles to guide thought and action, and that through self-examination we can discover them for ourselves.
We are all more or less Platonists, if only because the way he stated the questions has determined the course of philosophy ever since. Plato (427-347 B.C.) is considered the Father of Idealism, the belief that ideas inform physical things more than the other way around. Plato’s mother traced her lineage to Solon, who first gave the laws to Athens; his father traced his lineage to Poseidon, the God of the Sea. It was natural for someone of this heritage to be interested in leading the state. If Plato had not become a philosopher, he would have most likely become an emperor or king. Plato was not just a philosopher, but a poet--the four dialogues we will read form a Greek tragedy with Socrates as the ill-fated hero; plus in his writings he places his most important ideas in the form of myth. He was most impressed with mathematics, and used numbers to illustrate his ideas. But Plato was also a mystic, claiming that his most significant studies were incapable of being put into words, but revealed themselves only after prolonged contemplation. He founded the Academy, the first University, which was a school for statesmen. It lasted 1000 years. Plato gave us the first unified world view, incorporating all fields of knowledge into one systematic theory.
Heraclitus had argued that reality is a process, that everything changes all the time. Parmenides had argued that reality is one, that anything changing cannot be real. They only contradict each other if they are talking about the same thing. Plato argued that they were both right, because they were talking about different things. One reality (Heraclitus’s world) is constantly changing; this world is revealed in sense perception, and is made up of the tables, chairs, trees, and people we experience. But there is another reality (Parmenides’s world) that is permanent and unchanging; this world is knowable in thought, and is made up of the objects of thought, or forms. Forms are the essences of things, what allows us to use the same word to identify many different tables, chairs, trees, and people. The form of a thing is its single, essential nature which is unchanging; it cannot seen nor heard; it cannot be perceived with the senses; it is not bound in space and time; but is revealed in thought. When we think, we are thinking about forms.
When a geometrician is proving that the interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles, he is thinking about a property triangles possess independently of any particular, existing, sensible triangle. There is a public entity, triangle, whose properties are revealed in thought. A triangle is a plane figure enclosed by three straight lines, but a piece of paper is not a perfect plane, and lines drawn by pencils are not perfect lines. The physical object drawn in pencil is not a triangle, but like a triangle. This nonphysical, nonspatial, nontemporal object of thought, not sense, is what Plato called a form (ideai). It is important for Plato that there are forms in the study of ethics, too; right and wrong, good and bad are also forms. Forms are abstract universals, like absolute justice, beauty, and goodness. Knowledge must be universal and necessary, and must therefore have as its objects eternal, unchanging forms.
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Stephen Carden stephen.carden@kctcs.net Jan 12, 1998