Plato

V

Political Theory and Ethics

The Republic, Plato’s major political work, is concerned with the question of justice. Starting with the question “Does justice pay for the individual, apart from any external rewards?”, it argues that justice in the soul is linked to justice in the city. Both soul and city have three analogous parts: a desiring part; a spirited part (something like the will); and a rational part. Justice involves each part carrying out its own proper function; Plato argues that this means that the two non-rational parts must be ruled by the rational part. Far from being a mere analogy, the relation between soul and the city turns out to mean that the two lower classes in the city must be ruled by the highest class, the philosophers. They alone can use their reason to acquire knowledge of the forms.

The political structure of the just city would thus depend on a thorough educational programme, which selects the potential philosophers on the basis of merit, without regard to class or gender, and trains them ultimately to know and love the forms, through which each person progresses to his or her maximal level of ability. Such an education must begin by training the appetites and spirit to accede to the rule of reason, and so the earlier stages involve music and gymnastics, which seek to harmonize the passions. The later stages of education use mathematics as a gateway to the forms.

Once the philosophers are selected, their autocratic rule in the light of reason must be safeguarded from corruption. Therefore, they are to be deprived of private property and families, and forced to pay attention to civic affairs instead of only contemplating the forms. Such drastic measures alone can ensure that their rule is for the sake of the city as a whole and not for their private interests.

Nevertheless, Plato is not sanguine about the stability of such a regime; he foresees a failure of the philosophers to apply their ideal knowledge and the decline of regimes that would then follow. In the absence of an ideal city, the individual can only seek to know the form of the Good and guide his or her actions by that knowledge, which Plato compares to the patterns of the stars.

VI

Art

Plato’s view of art involved a deep tension. On the one hand, his works are celebrated as great literature. On the other hand, he was acutely aware that writers such as Homer were rivals to his vision of the rational society, since art could appeal to irrational emotions that it could develop to subvert rather than support reason. He therefore insisted in The Republic that artists should be censored so that their art served the purposes of justice, reason, and religion. At his most critical, he argued that whereas physical objects (such as flowers) are one step away from the reality of the forms (such as Beauty), pictures and artistic representations of the flowers are two steps away from reality. Artists are therefore estranged from knowledge, even though they may be inspired by a kind of madness with which Socrates and Plato were not unfamiliar.

VII

Influence

Plato’s influence on the later history of philosophy has been monumental. His Academy continued in existence, though purveying very different teachings, until ad 529, when it was closed by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I for conflicting with Christianity. Plato’s impact on Jewish thought is apparent in the work of the 1st-century Alexandrian philosopher Philo Judaeus. Neoplatonism, founded by the 3rd-century philosopher Plotinus, transformed Platonism in terms of Christianity and Christianity in terms of Platonism. This Christian engagement with Plato was continued by the theologians Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St Augustine. Platonic ideas were also crucial to medieval Islamic thought, and many dialogues were preserved in Arabic, then re-translated into Latin and Greek during the Renaissance.

A focus of Platonic influence then became the Florentine Academy, founded in the 15th century near Florence. Under the leadership of Marsilio Ficino, members of the Academy studied Plato in the original Greek, although Plato’s thought never exercised the institutional authority of Aristotle’s, who for his part dominated the scholastic movement. In England Platonism was revived in the 17th century by Ralph Cudworth and others who became known as the Cambridge Platonists.

British thinkers engaged with Plato in the 19th century as a source for Victorian values and beliefs in education. In the 20th century, figures such as Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt interrogated Plato to see how far his ideas prefigured totalitarianism. Reflecting on this remarkable intellectual history, Alfred North Whitehead concluded that the history of philosophy is but “a series of footnotes to Plato”.

See also Idealism; Metaphysics.