Drawing a line between Socrates’ thought and Plato’s is very difficult. As we’ve mentioned, Plato was a student of Socrates. It’s clear that Plato reveres his teacher, setting him up as a kind of unimpeachable ideal of what a philosopher should be. It’s also clear that the death of his teacher at the hands of the political powers-that-be in Athens had a big impact on the young Plato; it left him with a grim perspective on the dangers of tyranny or a rule by the mob and popular opinion, and this becomes a recurring theme in his philosophy. So whilst we might hesitate to say that Socrates taught Plato everything he knows, to say Socrates was a big influence on Plato would be under-selling it.
Also already mentioned is that most of what we know about Socrates’ philosophy comes from Plato’s writings. Socrates himself didn’t write anything down, so besides the other few representations of him that we find in theatre (where he is routinely mocked), other students’ works (like Xenephon’s duller depiction), or times where he pops up in the records of historical events (such as when he stood up for some soon-to-be-executed Athenian generals who were being scapegoated for the loss of a naval battle), we only have Plato’s version to go on.
But which version? Across the dialogues, we get some very different versions of Socrates, not always consistent with himself.
The consensus is that Plato began writing the dialogues intending only to capture the essence of his teacher’s thought, and as such the so-called ‘early’ Platonic dialogues are understood to be more representative of Socrates’ thought; unadulterated, if not unabridged. As Plato developed his own thought, however, he began to incorporate more of this work into the dialogues, placing it in the mouth of his main protagonist, Socrates. These more ‘Platonic’ elements are not always easy to spot, especially as Socrates plays with a range of different ideas, often ironically or to rhetorical effect. Eventually, however, we get to a point where the Platonic dialogues show hardly anything recognisable of the ‘original’ Socrates. The scepticism and ironic humility disappears; all that seems to remain is Plato expounding his elaborate metaphysical theories.
We get into the habit of calling this a progression from ‘early’, through ‘middle’, to ‘late’, but all we can really say is that some of the Platonic dialogues portray Socrates as asking a lot of questions, breaking down the false knowledge of others, prioritising the ethical, but offering few positive answers of his own; whilst some other dialogues portray Socrates offering extended monologues, constructing elaborate metaphysical theories, prioritising theoretical kinds of knowledge like mathematics or geometry, and offering positive answers to philosophical questions. And some of the dialogues are a mixed bag of somewhere in between. We call these the ‘early’, ‘late’, or ‘middle’, but a lot of this chronology is based on the content only. As such, drawing a definitive line in the sand is almost impossible, and so some creative license is called for.
The difference that remains is a matter of emphasis rather than clear division. It’s easier to caricature this difference in emphasis, and that’s what I’ll do: Plato’s emphasis is more on theoretical knowledge and metaphysics, whilst Socrates’ is on practical knowledge and ethics. As I see it, there is metaphysics in Socrates, but it is downplayed; there is ethics in Plato, but it is subordinate to his metaphysical story. Socrates walked around barefoot, visibly poor, harassing influential passers-by and asking them questions about virtue. Plato set up an Academy – named for the area of the city in which it was located, which was some distance from the marketplace – and taught geometry to wealthy youths (he didn’t charge any fees, though). They were clearly different characters, for all their shared philosophical ground.
Plato the Metaphysician
All this having been said, whenever I speak about something being more ‘Platonic’ than ‘Socratic’, what I mean by that is that it’s more metaphysical in tone and focus, rather than ethical. Socrates gave us the absolute priority of the ethical, telling us that everything depends upon living well. Plato tells us that everything, even Socrates’ knowledge about the priority of the ethical, depends on knowledge of metaphysics.
The route to this conclusion is easy to see. Socrates has just told us that nothing is more important than living a decent life, having a ‘healthy soul’, but that a kind of knowledge is essential in order to do this. We need to know both what it is to live well and how to do it. Philosophy is the way to get this knowledge, so we need philosophy.
But what is philosophy, when it is not Socrates asking a lot of questions? It is the exercise of reason. We apply our intellectual powers to a problem and try to think it through. It is not like kicking a football or playing the drums: you can try to think these things through, but for the most part it’s about hitting stuff, physically doing something. Philosophy is an activity of the brain more than the body; even when it’s something that is done, it’s something that is done by thinking.
Plato slowly moves into this realm of pure thinking. In Plato’s mature philosophy, there is less focus on conversation, less focus on the down-to-earth ethical questions about whether this or that is a good thing or not, and more focus on the pure pursuit of abstract intellectual understanding.
Two Worlds
This shift in emphasis leads Plato to make an important discovery: there is a world that we see with our eyes and a world that we see with our minds.
When we look around, using our eyes, we can see a bunch of things. I might see a lovely painting of a horse, for example, hanging on the wall of an art gallery. This is a physical object – a painting of a horse – that represents another physical object: a horse. In a sense, the actual horse is ‘truer’ and ‘more real’ than the painting of the horse. A painting is but a faint copy, whereas the horse is really real. When I look at a painting of a horse, I can see a representation or image of the horse, but I cannot reach out and touch the horse, only the painting; the horse is not really there. The painting is inherently less reliable as a representation of reality than the horse itself: we can ask of the painting of the horse ‘is that an accurate representation?’, whereas the horse itself just is. The distinction here is between what Plato calls ‘images’ and ‘visible things’. Things are more real than their images, but at least both of these we can see with our eyes.
But what about mathematical objects like triangles, or numbers? Obviously we can see the representations of these things with our eyes when we draw a triangle or write down some numbers. But these are only representations of the numbers, not the numbers themselves; they are like the painting of the horse, not the horse itself.
How can we ‘see’ the numbers or shapes themselves? With our eyes, we obviously cannot, because they are not physical objects. Shapes and numbers are mathematical objects. We ‘see’ them with our minds. We learn our numbers and understand what a triangle is by learning a thing or two about mathematics and geometry. We use physical representations to do this, but those representations should not be mistaken for the reality itself. In reality, the numbers and shapes do not physically exist in this world but exist immaterially in the world of the intellect.
What we are left with is a division between the ‘visible world’ and the ‘intelligible world’. The visible world is the world that we can see with our eyes, but we need not limit ourselves to the metaphor of vision here and could easily talk in terms of ‘hearing’ or ‘touching’, or even ‘smelling’, so we can call this the ‘physical world’; the intelligible world is the world that we can see (or hear, feel, sniff) with our minds.
Dualism
This is the birth of the very long-standing philosophical theory of ‘dualism’. This theory says that there are essentially two kinds of stuff: physical stuff and mental stuff. Physical stuff is material, existing in time and space, mental stuff is not. Because mental stuff is immaterial, it doesn’t exist in time or space, and therefore exists eternally. It is this simple inference that provides the philosophical foundation for ideas about the immortality of the soul.
The Priority of the Intelligible World
There is a hierarchy of reality for Plato here. A picture of a horse is less real than the horse that it represents. The picture is just a representation of that actual object. Likewise, a drawing of a triangle is less real than the concept of a triangle. The drawing of a triangle is just a representation of that actual concept. What this means is that, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the world we see in our minds is more real than the world we see with our eyes: the intelligible world is more real than the visible world.
But if the intelligible world is more real than the visible or physical world, and we want to understand reality itself, then we should try to understand the intelligible world rather than the physical world. And this gives priority to the world of pure reason, rather than down-to-earth physical reality. We should trust our intellect and not our eyes.
Ironically (because this all sounds very unscientific to modern ears), we are forced into agreement with Plato when we consider how we tackle the hardest problems in physics. At the boundaries of theoretical physics, there are no observations that can be made, nothing that can be seen with our eyes (or even our measuring apparatus). We trust instead to the pure reason of mathematics. Where you draw the line between the ‘observable’ and the ‘non-observable’ is a controversial question in the philosophy of science, but it’s clear that there probably is a line to be drawn somewhere and theoretical physicists regularly cross over it. They postulate theoretical entities, unobservable but no less real for that. These ‘intelligible objects’ are things that we can see with our minds, with our understanding, and we trust that they are real, that the physical world does align with these intelligible realities. We take these intelligible realities to be reflective of reality itself. But we have long since abandoned the idea that we are directly looking at actual physical stuff. The best physicists understand the world at that intelligible level, not just the physical or visible level. Plato’s philosophy is a direct analogy here: the best knowledge is knowledge of the intelligible world, not of the physical or visible world. The best philosophers, therefore, will understand the world at that other-worldly level.
But it needn’t be as complicated as theoretical physics. The basic idea is intuitive for day to day things: We use reason to correct our perceptions. The classic example is two people stepping into water. The first person is hot from sitting in the sun, so when they step into the water the water feels cold to them. The second person is cold from sitting in an overly air-conditioned room, so when they step into the water the water feels warm to them. So is the water cold or warm? The first person perceives this ‘material reality’ one way, the second perceives it a different way. They each have their ‘opinion’ about the temperature of the water, and one of them might have the ‘true opinion’, but neither has ‘knowledge’ because they are only reporting things as they seem to them. What is the right answer here? To find the ‘truth’ about the temperature of the water, we step back from either person’s perception and rely on an objective measure: a thermometer gives us a reading in terms of a perfected idea (or theory) that we have about temperature. We represent this idea using numbers on a scale. This, we think, is more real than any one person’s perception because it captures the ‘intelligible reality’ of temperature. The best understanding of temperature is found at that intelligible level. This is how we turn mere ‘opinion’ into ‘knowledge’. We measure heat according to our perfected idea of it, not muddied by our faulty perceptions. If someone feels the water to be warm, when it objectively isn’t, then we say ‘you only feel that way because you’re cold’. The person’s perception can be wrong, corrupted, biased, dishonest, or mistaken, but the thermometer never lies.
It needn’t be complicated, and it needn’t be scientific either. Put someone in front of a work of art when they are in a bad mood and they might think that what they’re looking at is junk and nonsense that has no value. Put the same person in front of the same work of art when they are in a better mood and they might see it differently. The art hasn’t changed, but the person’s perception of it has, having been altered by their mood. What is the truth of the ‘beauty’ in the work of art? Can we trust to this person’s fickle opinion? Instead, let us step back and consider what our perfect ‘idea’ of beauty is and whether that idea is represented in this artwork. The highest understanding will operate at that intelligible level.
Plato’s Ideas
Plato follows this line of reasoning and finds that the hierarchy of reality is not only true of pictures and mathematical objects, but of physical objects too. A picture of a horse is less real than a horse itself, just as a drawing of a triangle is less real than the concept of a triangle; but by that reasoning, wouldn’t a concept of a horse be more real than an embodied example of one? Just as we can ask whether a picture of a horse is an accurate representation of an individual horse, we can ask of any individual horse whether it is an accurate representation of the idea of a horse. ‘Is this really a horse?’, we might say, or even ‘is this a good example of a horse?’.
An actual horse is, after all, just one horse. It might be a bad example of a horse, acting like an inaccurate representation of the idea of a horse just as a bad picture is an inaccurate representation of an actual horse. Pictures are vulnerable to distortion, degradation, destruction. You can get bad paintings of horses as well as lovely ones. Likewise, actual horses are vulnerable to distortion, degradation, destruction. You can get bad examples of horses as well as good ones. The idea of a horse is not so limited. In being an immaterial idea, it exists outside of space and time, and is therefore eternal. It is perfect, incapable of distortion, degradation, destruction. If we see it with our minds, we see it in its truest form.
We use this hierarchy of reality to check the accuracy of our thoughts and perceptions. Just as we measure the accuracy of a picture against the actual object that it represents, and we measure the accuracy of a drawn triangle against the concept that it represents, so too we measure a particular instance of an object against the idea of that object. We measure the picture of the horse against the actual horse, and the actual horse against the idea of a horse. The idea is more real, because it is part of the ‘intelligible world’ rather than the visible or physical world. The physical or visible world is unreliable, prone to distortion and error; only the idea of the horse is perfect, eternal, unchanging, and knowable.
Following this line of reasoning, Plato comes to understand reality as being divided into a hierarchy that spans the physical and intelligible worlds. The lowest form of reality is ‘images’, or representations of physical things, such as we see in statues, pictures, photographs, poems and prose, etc. These things aren’t really real, and Plato is pretty dismissive about their value. They are at best imperfect representations of imperfect representations, flawed copies of flawed copies; they are far removed from anything really real.
Above that we get the physical things that those images represent, the objects themselves, like horses, people, sunflowers, etc. These are more real than the ‘images’, but still not really real. They are still only imperfect representations of really real things, which are the perfect ideas that those objects represent.
Above that ‘visible’ world we enter the ‘intelligible’ world of mathematical objects and the realm of what he calls the ‘Forms’ or ideas. These are the things that are really real. In this realm we find all the ‘Forms’ of anything that can exist: the perfect ideas of all we are able to know. They exist in this immaterial world eternally, unchangingly, perfectly. To get knowledge, real knowledge, we just need to get access to this realm of ideas.
Gnostic Dualism
This gives rise to a dangerous thought: The physical world is not really real; it is only a representation; it is a faulty copy of the real immaterial world that lies beneath. It’s not too big a leap to see this as something sinister. Material reality is some kind of big trick, keeping us locked in illusion and imprisoned in something not really real. To escape this prison we need knowledge, special knowledge, secret knowledge. Our purpose is to escape this false material reality and get to the true spiritual reality underneath, but we need someone to show us how. It’s pretty easy for a religious cult to exploit this, and many did. Some still do. This dangerous idea had a lasting influence, forming the basis for many of the ‘Gnostic’ heresies that early Christian orthodoxy defined itself against.
A lot of this is Plato’s fault. In his work, the Timaeus, Plato tells a story about the creation of the physical world. Like many creation myths, it’s clearly meant to be an instructive allegory and probably not intended to be taken literally. The physical world is said to be the work of a ‘craftsman’, who crafts it according to the perfect ideas contained in the intelligible world, like a builder working from plans or blueprints. Or perhaps like anyone trying to assemble flat-packed furniture: you follow the instructions and try to make it look like the image on the box. Plato’s point is that for us to understand and see the orderliness in the physical world – which can sometimes seem random and chaotic and confusing – we need to see the world as if from the perspective of the craftsman who created it. Much like the flat-packed furniture, everything makes more sense when you look at the plans. When you open your flat-packed furniture, it’s chaos that makes no sense; but look at the plans and now you can see that this particular shape is the front of a drawer, these the sides, these the runners, etc., etc. The plans enable you to build order from chaos. Which neatly expresses Plato’s understanding of knowledge: To see meaning in the physical world you need to see it as if from the perspective of the intelligible world.
Plato’s creation myth is his way of illustrating this idea. The physical world is confusing and chaotic, but look at it as if it were the creation of a skilled craftsman who is working from perfect plans: try to understand the world from that perspective and now you can see the meaning in the chaos, the order in the disorder; the world makes more sense this way.
And because this is Plato, this allegory also has important ethical implications: Imagine you are the ‘craftsman’, responsible for the creation of yourself. (Which you are, because who else will do it for you?) A craftsman should work in reference to a plan or blueprint. Without reference to a plan, what you see in front of you can seem chaotic and meaningless and difficult to understand. But everything makes more sense when you look at the plans. So when it comes to the difficult and confusing task of crafting yourself, what plan are you working from? To understand this you have to investigate the idea of yourself in the intelligible world. Think of what you understand as a ‘good’ person or a good version of yourself; picture it as a perfected idea of what you think you should be. That idea is like a plan, a blueprint, and you should craft yourself according to that plan. You should try to make yourself resemble the pattern of life that looks most like that plan. That’s the important message: you are your own ‘craftsman’, and by investigating the ‘patterns of life’ in the intelligible world you can create order from chaos.
The word ‘craftsman’ tells an interesting story here. The original Greek word is ‘demiourgos’, which just means ‘someone who works for the people’ and would have been used to refer to anyone who was skilled at making a certain thing: so we choose the unremarkable word ‘craftsman’. Eventually Plato’s use of ‘demiourgos’ gets transformed into the word ‘demiurge’, which means a kind of god. For whatever reason, the allegorical meaning of Plato’s creation myth seems to have been sidelined in favour of a literal interpretation: It’s not like the world was created by a craftsman, it actually was created by a craftsman.It was this literal interpretation that went on to be influential in later developments of Platonism, eventually called ‘Neo-Platonism’, which was the dominant philosophical school of thought during the emergence of Christianity. The Christians and Gnostics fought over Plato’s ‘craftsman’, and in doing so buried the important allegorical message beneath layers of mystical nonsense.
Mysticism, in being untethered from reason and too easily flowing from ignorance, has a tendency to corrupt most good ideas; the fate of the Timaeus is a sadly ironic illustration of this point.
The Realm of the Forms
And so we come onto Plato’s metaphysical theory of the Forms. Another careful use of words is needed here, since ‘Form’ is a distinct term of art for Plato’s philosophy. It doesn’t directly translate to any English word because it is a distinct concept in itself. To simplify, the concept of a ‘Form’ is somewhere between the two English words of ‘idea’, which is like a mental concept of something, and ‘form’ which is the actual physical appearance of something, its shape and texture, etc. We don’t need to get into the dense technical details here, and it’s not clear that there’s a coherent picture to be had anyway. Suffice to say that the ‘realm of Forms’ is Plato’s metaphysical explanation of reality, driven by his priority of reason: we see with our minds better than we see with our eyes, and so what we ‘see’ with our minds when we ‘recognise’ a horse is the Form or idea of a horse instantiated in a physical object. The physical object is nothing but a representation of the idea of that object. The idea is really real and is the true source of knowledge; the representation is not.
There is some intuitive power to this theory. Imagine looking at a horse, which is very small, quite rotund, shaggy-haired, brown in colour, with a long flowing mane and a white blaze on its nose. Now imagine looking at another horse, which is tall, sleek, jet black, with a short mane and no white blaze. These two horses look very different. But despite that vast difference, you easily recognise both of them as a horse. What is it that enables you to so easily make that recognition?
You could point to the points of similarity, rather than difference. They each have four legs, for example. But lots of animals have four legs, and you don’t often mistake a horse for a sheep, or a lion. You could say that they both have a similar shape head. But a donkey’s head is pretty similar to a horse’s, and you don’t often mistake a donkey for a horse. And in terms of ‘similarity of shape’ of the head, how far is a horse from a goat, or a giraffe, or an antelope? Not least when we consider that the shape of horses’ heads can vary hugely across breeds. Whichever way you run it, you will never find enough points of similarity to base such an easy recognition. And even so, it’s really much easier than that, isn’t it? Do you really consider any of these things when looking at a horse, or is it just obvious?
Recognising horses as horses, or sheep as sheep, dogs as dogs, people as people, etc., no matter the difference, is easy. It is second nature. When we encounter a previously unseen difference in something like a horse, we don’t even break our stride in our recognition: ‘What an unusual horse!’, we might say. We know it’s something we’ve never seen before, and yet we know it’s a horse.
What is doing the work here, to enable us to make such easy recognition? According to Plato’s theory, it is that we understand the ‘idea’ of a horse. Because of that understanding – that ‘seeing’ in the intelligible world – we are able to recognise representations of that idea when they appear in front of us in the visible world.
In your mind, you will have an idea of a horse. Maybe this is a kind of picture, but it need not be because an idea can be more abstract than that. Because you have this idea in your mind, you are able to recognise any instance of it in the visible world, and you can do so without thinking or even looking that hard. It’s only when we encounter something truly unusual that we might hesitate in our recognition – ‘is that a horse?’ – and this is because the new unusual thing is challenging our idea of what a horse is. Presented with something truly novel, we have to adjust our idea of what a horse can be, and that causes us to pause. But the basic process of recognition is then the same. We measure the visible reality against the intelligible reality.
In fact, not only does the existence of an idea in your mind explain how you are able to recognise objects so easily, it explains how it’s even possible at all. If you did not have an idea of a horse, how could you recognise one when it appeared in front of you? ‘What is this strange four-legged creature?!’, you might say. Until we formulate an ‘idea’ of a distinct thing, like a horse or a person or a kangaroo, all we see in the visible world is a strange combination of sense data. Like that semi-dreaming state that we experience when we awaken in a darkened room and struggle to make sense of the shadowy shapes in front of us; at some point your mind ‘flips’ and the abstract sense-data gets converted into concrete objects, the shadowy shapes becoming a coat, a bag, a table. It’s the mind that’s doing the work here, not the eyes.
The Power of the Mind
This is a very important idea in philosophy but also one that is very controversial. You won’t have to wait too long to find it questioned, in Aristotle (a student of Plato), but the debate still continues. Is it the mind that does the work to understand the world, or does the world determine the understanding of our minds? Do we see horses, rather than a confusing collection of atoms in a nondescript shape, because we have an idea of a horse? Or do we have an idea of a horse because we see horses? This is one of the foundational disagreements in philosophy, persisting to become the contrast between what is called ‘rationalism’ and what is called ‘empiricism’ in the Enlightenment period. It is the combination and contrast between these two things that gives rise to modern science, and indeed all modern thought as we know it. We will come to them in time.
For now, I think the best illustration of the role of the mind in seeing the world comes from one who can claim to have resolved the controversy: the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It’s not the time or place to introduce Wittgenstein’s theory here, but we can co-opt one of his examples for our purposes: He pictures one of those drawings that can be seen in two ways, such as a silhouette of a vase that is also a silhouette of two faces looking at one another, or, in his favoured example, a duck-rabbit. This is a doodle of a duck that can also be seen as a rabbit, depending on how you look at it. The ‘ears’ of the rabbit can also be seen as the ‘bill’ of the duck. What matters here is that what you see depends on what you think. If you think of it as a rabbit, you see a rabbit; if you think of it as a duck, you see a duck. For Wittgenstein, what you are seeing here is two different aspects of the same thing, because it’s a duck-rabbit.
The picture itself is not changing at all; only your mind or your perspective is changing. What this shows is that it is your mind or your understanding of what the lines mean that enables you to see these aspects in the world. Without your ideas, the picture is just a doodled line.
There’s an important lesson to be learned here, in this simple example: Philosophical understanding often comes from coming to see the same familiar things in new and different ways. When you learn something in philosophy, the world does not change; you do.
We do this all the time without even realising. Other good examples of the role of ‘understanding in the intelligible world’ determining what we ‘see in the visible world’ are available from games or sports. To learn a game – something like chess, to choose an easy example – first you have to learn what the pieces represent, which means learning how you can use them in the context of the game. Now, you no longer ‘see’ just a bunch of funny-shaped pieces of plastic, you see chess pieces; you see a ‘castle’, or a ‘pawn’, or a ‘bishop’, etc. The actual shape (touch, smell, sound, etc.) of these things hardly matters; you see what they are with your mind, with your understanding; you see what they represent. You could replace the ‘castle’ with a coin, and if both players agreed to the substitution, you could carry on without even noticing. You see past the physical object.
As you progress in learning the game, you see more than just the pieces. You see a winning opportunity, a bad move, a clever strategy. You see two moves ahead. None of this is changing the facts of the matter: the eyes of the non-chess-player literally see the same images as the eyes of an experienced-chess-player. But what is seen in the intelligible world is very different, and that difference results in them seeing a very different world. One world is just a random bunch of plastic shapes scattered on a flat surface; the other world is densely populated with meaning.
There’s a lot more of interest (and importance) to be said about that example, but let us slowly return to Plato by pointing out that seeing more on a chessboard requires the exercise and development of your understanding. By analogy, seeing more in the world, literally seeing more truth, requires the exercise and development of your understanding. That is Plato’s basic insight, and it determines his philosophical method.
Knowledge is Top-Down
Plato concludes that ‘knowledge’ is nothing other than ‘knowledge of the Forms’. Said in a way that doesn’t refer to Plato’s term-of-art, this means something close to all ‘knowledge’ being nothing more than knowledge of ideas. You don’t need actual examples, let alone evidence, to ground your knowledge. To know what a horse is, for example, is just to be acquainted with the idea of a horse. To know what a triangle is is just to understand the concept of a triangle. To know what ‘courage’ is is just to understand the concept of courage. You don’t need to actually be courageous or have fought in battles to know what courage is, any more than you need to be a horse to know what a horse is. Perfect knowledge of all things can be achieved just by investigating the idea of the thing in question.
We see now how far we have moved from Socrates. Socrates claimed to know nothing; Plato claims not only to know things, but to really know things because he knows the method of knowing things, opening a route to knowledge of all things, which can be achieved just by sitting in a garden and doing the philosophical equivalent of working out the mathematics. Knowledge of metaphysics and the Forms gives a way of knowing everything.
Socrates seemed to think (judging from both his words and the way he lived) it was essential to proper philosophical method that we have sincere face-to-face conversations, but this doesn’t seem to be essential in Plato’s method: geometry is geometry and the Forms are the Forms, conversation won’t change this. In fact, many of those things that Socrates seemed to value start to look indifferent or even problematic in Plato’s view. Why claim ignorance when you have such a clear idea of the truth? Why ask questions when you already know the answer, and know your answer is the actual answer? Why talk to people at all? A philosophical conversation in the physical world is just a faint copy of the idea of a philosophical conversation in the intelligible world, isn’t it? So why don’t we just picture the conversation in that ideal form (such as in a written dialogue…) and not get distracted by these messy down-to-earth realities? Why bother with people’s laziness, stupidity, arrogance, insincerity, etc., when you can bypass all that by engaging in philosophy at the level of the intelligible world? Since most people (who are not educated and trained in geometry and the like) are liable to be stupid, lazy, ignorant, insincere, etc., why bother talking to them? If you want to be a philosopher and find the truth, best to retreat to the peace and quiet of an Academy and put a sign on the door saying ‘let no one enter who hasn’t studied geometry’.
I am caricaturing the difference between Socrates and Plato here, obviously, exaggerating the difference to make it more clear, but it is an important difference all the same. Plato’s philosophy slowly becomes more ‘other-worldly’, more detached from day-to-day reality. As we’ve seen, this all follows directly from what Socrates taught about the priority of philosophy over everyday common sense. We think we know more than we do, but a bit of serious questioning reveals that we don’t know as much as we thought. We don’t know much at all, in fact. Something has to replace this newfound lack of knowledge, and it turns out that philosophy is that something. That this sends philosophy into an ‘other-worldly’ focus is an accidental yet unavoidable consequence, for Plato.
The Allegory of the Cave
The best illustration of this gradual movement into the other-worldly is given to us by Plato himself. In his great book, The Republic, Plato describes an allegory that captures our Socratic realisation of ignorance, the process by which we escape that ignorance, the more Platonic metaphysical knowledge that results, and the dangerous consequences that this has for philosophers and their reputation (all the more impactful when we know how Socrates met his end). All of this is to be found in the ‘Allegory of the Cave’.
Imagine a cave, underground (as caves are), with no natural light. In this cave are people chained up and chained down; they cannot move a muscle, not even their heads from left to right, and they have been stuck like that forever. They have never known any different. They are stuck in a dark cave looking at the wall directly in front of them. On this wall are shadows, cast from a fire behind them. Between the fire and the people and the wall is a little runway with a kind of shadow-puppet theatre. The people look at the shadows on the wall – because that’s all they can look at, not being able to move their heads – and since they have been here like this forever, they take these shadows to be real. Those shadows are as real as it gets for them.
It’s a depressing picture. For Plato, this is what ‘ordinary ignorant people’, non-philosophers, are like. We walk around thinking we are knowing things and understanding things and engaging with reality, but really we’re just looking at shadows. Socrates shows us this when his questioning exposes our ignorance: in thinking we had a clear idea of something (like ‘courage’, for example) we took a shadow for a reality.
That we are imprisoned in this shadow-theatre, ‘in chains’, is an important image. It resurfaces time and time again, I think. We see it in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s powerful opening line: ‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.’ In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau goes on to explain these chains in terms of the inequality of a class-based society, but he is closer to Plato than that political theory makes it seem. We see it also in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), the work that should be considered the first step in the emergence of modern science; Bacon says we need to break free from this shadow-theatre of established convention in order to find the reality behind, and we need the scientific method to do so.
We are imprisoned by our ignorance. What happens when we break the chains? What is the first thing someone realises, in this dark cave, once they break free of their chains and has a proper look around?
The first thing they realise is that they have a sore neck. As Plato puts it, they ‘suffer sharp pains’. They realise they were in chains. Then they look left and right and see a bunch of other people in chains too.
This is Socrates’ first step, essentially. He realises that he does not actually have a clear idea about anything; he tests the ideas that he has and finds them wanting. He realises that we all too often take convention’s word for it. Once he thinks for himself, he breaks those mental chains. This is not a pleasant experience; it’s painful. He realises that he was taking a shadow for a reality. He knows that he does not know. And now he looks around and sees a bunch of people who still think they know. They are all still in chains. They are still taking a shadow for reality. But that is no longer an option for him. Once you’ve broken the chains, there’s no locking yourself back in.
So what’s the next thing you would do, once you’ve broken your chains, looked left and right, and seen a bunch of your fellow people still locked in chains?
You would try to free them. This is what Socrates does with his incessant questioning. In showing anyone, everyone, that they don’t really know what they are talking about, showing them that they are taking a shadow for a reality, he hopes to break their mental chains. He wants to liberate them from the chains, as he has liberated himself.
But they are locked in tight. He can’t free them. He looks around the cave some more, and sees the fire, and the shadow-puppets, and understands that he’s spent his life locked in a shadowy reality of illusion. He tries to snap people out of it; he tells them about the fire, about the shadow-puppets, about the real world behind them. But they don’t believe him. He sounds like a madman. Who in their right mind would question the shadow-reality when it’s all you’ve known?
He notices an opening to the cave, a way out, a slither of natural light breaking into the darkness of the cave. So he takes that way out. The way is difficult.
Plato makes some special effort to mention that the way is difficult, describing it as a ‘steep and rugged ascent’. You have to crawl out, or be dragged. Allegorically, this way out of the cave is the philosophical method of coming to greater knowledge and understanding. Plato knows this is no easy thing to do. Sadly, it’s not as simple as breaking the chains and then, by that act alone, getting true knowledge. Breaking the chains, realising that you don’t really know much, is just the first step; you realise you are in a cave, but you are still stuck in a cave. You need to find a way out of the dark cave, into the light of the world above, but it is not an easy route. You need to put effort into it. You need to persevere.
So Socrates crawls his way out of the cave, with much effort. What happens when he steps out into the world above? Well, given he’s spent all his life in a darkened cave, the brightness of a clear Greek day will be blinding. His eyes cannot see in the world above as clearly as they did in the cave because they have become accustomed to the darkness of the cave.
Allegorically, when we see philosophical truth – the real world, as opposed to the shadow-reality of the cave – we find it harder to see, harder to look at. Our (intellectual) eyes are accustomed to looking at shadows; they can’t see reality very well, at first. We have to persevere and let our eyes adjust. As they adjust, we have to trust that these new truths are real, even though they are difficult to see clearly.
Socrates’ eyes slowly adjust. And he looks around. He sees trees, plants, rocks, animals, the land and the sea and the sky. He sees the world as it really is, and all that it is.
Allegorically, this is the philosopher coming to see the Forms; the intelligible world that the visible world represents. This is to see the world as it really is.
Socrates casts his eyes up and sees the sun. Even with his eyes now adjusted to daylight, the sun is still blinding; he can’t look directly at it. All he can see is that it is an extraordinarily bright light that serves to illuminate all that he sees.
This might be the most important allegorical element in the whole story, because the sun here stands in place of ‘The Form of the Good’. For Plato, the ‘Form of the Good’, or the idea of goodness, is the top of the hierarchy of Forms, the most real thing that there is. We will return to that very shortly, once we have finished the full allegory, because Plato’s ‘Form of the Good’ is what determines the essence of his ethical philosophy.
Let’s return to the allegory of the cave. Socrates has broken his chains, left the cave, and has now seen the world above. What next? He will return to the cave to tell the others about what he’s seen.
Much is made of the opening line of The Republic, the book in which we find the allegory of the cave. ‘I went down…’, says Socrates, ‘…to the Piraeus.’ Socrates descends. The Piraeus is the port in Athens, which gives us a certain context. Ports are places of industry, of trade, of the hustle and bustle of society. They are not always the most salubrious of locations. Socrates went there to see a carnival.
It’s not a very big allegorical leap: Socrates descends into the cave of conventional society to tell them they are living in a shadow-world.
What happens when Socrates descends back into the darkness of the cave? He has just been in the brightness of daylight, living in the light of the sun. The cave is dark by comparison. His eyes take some time to adjust; at first, everything seems dark. He can’t even see the shadows on the wall.
Allegorically, this tells us that a philosopher, once acclimatised to the higher intelligible reality, will struggle to get by with the humdrum reality of convention. Once you have seen through the illusion, it’s very difficult to step back into it again. With philosophy, you become very good at dealing with higher intellectual realities, but very bad at dealing with lower, more mundane ones. This explains why philosophers are so often mocked for ‘having their head in the clouds’ or ‘lacking common sense’. It also excuses someone like Socrates for not being able to ‘win the argument’ in a law court, for example, when he faces a spurious accusation. For all their cleverness, philosophers do not appear to be the most practically-minded of people. They are rarely rich or powerful, or excel by the other measures of success that ordinary society values. This is probably true of most academics. As a group, they are not particularly renowned for their business acumen. In becoming absorbed in their subject, they now struggle to see the value in quotidian things.
But Socrates’ eyes start to adjust and with a bit of difficulty, stumbling around and such, he starts to navigate the cave once again. He finds the people locked in chains and tries to explain the situation. What happens when the cave-dwellers hear what Socrates has to say? They are still locked in chains, looking at the shadow-theatre and taking it for reality. Now they are told that not only is everything they’ve known an illusion, but this bloke has just been outside and there’s a whole other world up there, full of things they can’t even imagine. What a lunatic, they might think; just the ravings of a madman. Not only that, but this madman can’t even see the shadows on the wall. He can’t see the obvious! He’s stumbling around all over the place, as if he can’t see where he’s going. He’s the one out of touch with reality, they think; he’s the one who’s living in a dream world.
Plato includes a cynical little detail here, suggesting that the cave-dwellers would esteem those who are best at discerning the shadows on the wall, best at remembering the order in which they appear, and so best at predicting which will come next. Those who can do this are considered the most able amongst them; they are awarded prizes. Socrates, with his eyes still adjusting, wouldn’t fare well in this competition. Allegorically, this is the world of business and politics. The richest and most powerful in this world are those who are good at navigating the world of what people believe, regardless of the truth, and if people believe in shadows then you become rich and powerful by navigating that world of shadows. And in that world, how silly Socrates looks, going about the marketplace, visibly poor, barefoot, challenging the beliefs of successful people, accusing the rich and powerful of being miserable and ignorant. If he’s so clever, how come he’s not rich or powerful?
So they dismiss him as at worst a madman and at best a good-for-nothing. Either way, he’s not someone worth listening to. Socrates is left with no place in the world; he doesn’t belong in the cave anymore. But where else should he be?
Socrates’ contemporaries called him ‘atopos’, which colloquially translates as ‘odd’, but literally means ‘out-of-place’ or ‘having no place’. Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ has a clear message to philosophers: you will struggle to find a place in the world. Don’t expect reward or recognition for being a philosopher. The world will see you as ‘odd’, a good-for-nothing. This is inevitable because in challenging the conventions of common sense, the norms of value, etc., you must see through those illusions and stand apart from them. As such, you must expect to be dismissed as a good-for-nothing (or worse). If you are true to your subject, you should take such a dismissal, or a labelling as being ‘odd’ or ‘out-of-place’, as a good sign that you are on the right track. The example of Socrates being condemned to death for ‘corrupting the youth’ is a clear, if extreme, example of just this.
And yet, Plato concludes, what would such a philosopher, a true ‘lover of wisdom’, value higher than seeing the truth? Socrates would rather endure anything than go back to being locked in chains in a dark cave of ignorance.
The Form of the Good
In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato stresses an identification of the sun with the ‘Form of the Good’. In the cave-world, we cannot see the sun’s light, seeing only shadows cast by the flickering light of a fire. In the surface-world, we can see things illuminated clearly by the sun’s constant light, but we cannot look directly at the sun itself because it is too powerful and blinding. The Form of the Good is like the sun: it enlightens everything that we see – it’s by its light that we see anything real – but we cannot look directly at the Form of the Good. It enables us to see, but it remains hidden from our sight. This raises a lot of philosophical problems, both in terms of what Plato means by this, and in terms of what it means for those of us who are trying to take any lessons about how to live well from Plato’s philosophy.
In what follows, I will make an attempt at defending and explaining Plato’s allegorical link between the sun and the Form of the Good, but I want to make it clear that it is a simplified and slightly idiosyncratic defence. Its purpose is only to cover the ground between the Cave and whatever practical lessons we can learn from Plato’s philosophy, and it’s clear that the Form of the Good is playing an absolutely important role in that, so for that reason it deserves to be covered. But my explanation is speculative.
To my mind, two important things emerge from the allegorical link between the sun and Plato’s Form of the Good: Firstly, just as Socrates said that everything depends on being good, so too Plato says that knowledge of all things depends on the idea (Form) of goodness. In order to see the visible objects in the surface-world, you need the light of the sun; and in order to see intelligible objects in the realm of ideas, you need the Form of the Good. Understanding the idea of what ‘goodness’ is is what enables us to see the good in things, and that includes the truth in things.
It gets a bit ‘meta’ here, but bear with me: ideas about knowledge and truth take their place in Plato’s hierarchy of reality just as any other ideas. We can represent ‘knowledge’ in a ‘visible object’ – in a book, for example – but it would be a mistake to think that that representation was knowledge itself. A university friend once joked to me, at that point in first-year when you are acquiring the required books for your course: ‘Look how smart I am; I’ve got two massive books!’ That only works as a joke if you understand that, though books might contain knowledge, and having them might give you access to knowledge, they are not themselves knowledge. And so having books does not mean that you have knowledge. Perhaps that’s obvious. It seems clear that knowledge, if it exists at all, exists in the intelligible realm and not literally in books.
And just as with the other examples we’ve used – like pictures of horses and horses, or triangles and the concept of triangles – we can compare the representation of knowledge, in the book, with our idea of knowledge that exists in the intelligible realm, and that way see if the book is a good representation of knowledge. Just as with pictures of horses, there are bad representations of knowledge as well as good ones, and we need to refer to our concept of ‘knowledge’ in order to recognise the difference. So far, so standard Platonic story.
But what about the ‘intelligible object’ of knowledge? What about our concept of knowledge itself? Can there not be good or bad, or better or worse, concepts of knowledge? Look to your idea of ‘knowledge’ and you will see (probably) that it has various attributes: good knowledge is justified by good reasons, it is often gained by diligent study and confirmed by examination and qualification, it delivers pronouncements that accurately correspond with the world. Good knowledge is justified and true; knowledge is less good to the extent that it is not justified or not true.
In terms of understanding the fundamental role that the ‘Form of the Good’ plays in Plato’s system, it doesn’t really matter what your idea of good knowledge looks like. The point is that any criteria will appeal to an idea of ‘goodness’. This applies to knowledge itself, but also to everything else that you could care to think about. It’s this structural constancy that establishes the ‘Form of the Good’ at the top of Plato’s hierarchy of reality. You need to have an idea of ‘goodness’ in order to appraise anything at all.
Just as we need an idea of a horse in order to recognise a horse, so too we need an idea of ‘goodness’ in order to recognise a ‘good’ idea (as opposed to a bad one). What is it that makes it a good idea? Is it that it is true, or virtuous, or beautiful?
Structurally, this is no different from our other examples. For example: If you don’t know what a ‘horse’ is, then how would you know if you saw one? Likewise, if you don’t know what ‘good’ is, then how would you know when you saw it? What makes the Form of the Good special is that it applies to everything that is good and true and beautiful (or anything else we would care to call good). Ideas of horses only extend over horses, but the idea of goodness extends over everything.
It is only with an understanding of the idea of the ‘Good’ that we can recognise any good ideas at all. Therefore, the ‘Form of the Good’, or the idea of goodness, is at the top of the hierarchy of Forms: it’s literally the most important idea that you can have, which aligns happily with Socrates’ prioritisation of the ethical above all things.
That’s the first important thing to emerge from the allegorical link between the sun and the Form of the Good. The light of the sun is what enables us to see anything and everything in the world. The Form of the Good is what enables us to see the goodness and truth of anything at all; without it, we cannot tell the good ideas from the bad.
But secondly, this idea of ‘Goodness’ is essentially mysterious and elusive. You’ll notice that it has taken on a quasi-religious capitalisation as ‘the Good’ to reflect this new special status. As hard as we try to formulate the idea in our minds, we can never seem to fully grasp it directly. In trying to express what the ‘Good’ is, we find ourselves constantly pointing to examples of it in the visible or intelligible worlds, none of which are actual goodness itself but merely instances or examples of it. Good things are ‘good’, but they are not themselves ‘the Good’. A book can be a representation of knowledge, and knowledge can be a representation of the Good, but what is the Good a representation of? When we try to climb to the top of Plato’s hierarchical ladder of Forms, we find that we can’t grasp the final rung: ‘the Good’ is very resistant to explanation or definition.
For example, if I ask you to show me something good in the world, and you tell me a story of someone acting bravely in difficult circumstances, I might reply: ‘ah, that’s a good example of courage, but what is courage?’ So you climb Plato’s ladder, shift into the intelligible world, and explain to me what the idea of courage is, I might reply: ‘ah, so courage is good, and it seems to have that in common with the other virtues…but what is goodness?’ What do you say?
Spoiler alert: Whatever you say next will almost certainly end up being either reductive or assertive and neither of these are satisfactory to a Platonist (or to Socrates).
If your answer is reductive, you will say that the good is ‘nothing but’ something else; answers of this kind are very common in the history of moral philosophy and are very popular with scientifically-minded philosophers. To my mind, they mostly constitute a kind of ‘that’ll do for now…’ or ‘for want of a better answer…’ cop out. Goodness is ‘nothing but’ the maximisation of pleasures over pains; goodness is ‘nothing but’ evolved dispositions to act in a certain way; goodness is ‘nothing but’ the conventions of society. None of these stands up to Socratic scrutiny (at least in this philosopher’s opinion). The best you could say of them is that they are the best we can do, for now, but they remain riddled with problems and inconsistencies; that’s hardly enough to qualify as a ‘perfect’ idea in Plato’s world.
If your answer is assertive then it will lack any reason to justify its truth and/or be circular in its justification. Examples of this are easy to find in religiously-grounded ethics, e.g.: ‘Goodness is what God commands and God commands it because it’s good.’ But you can also find non-religious instances of this when people claim that they ‘just know’ what is right or wrong. Either way, what makes it good is that it’s good, and that’s all there is to say.
Either the Good is good because it’s good, or the Good is good because of something else that is not necessarily good. That we are forced to choose between two bad answers, assertive or reductive, is simply a result of Plato’s Form of the Good being what philosophers would call sui generis, meaning it’s a concept that cannot be reduced to anything else, and if it can be true then it will be made true only by its own reasons. In Plato’s understanding, everything else is made true in part by reference to the idea of goodness, but our ideas about goodness are made true only by the ideas that we have about goodness. It, and only it, can make itself true.
It’s not a very satisfactory answer. And yet we don’t want to give up our idea of goodness. That’s why people either abandon Platonism and accept one of the reductive answers, or else embrace Platonism and assert the unquestionable nature of the Good (as is the case in many monotheistic forms of religion).
Is there a way out of this bind? I think there is. If we want to hold it to be true that there is such a thing as ‘goodness’, beyond our evolved dispositions or social conventions, then the temptation is to assert that we just know it to be as it is. But this is to miss Socrates’ sceptical point:We know that we don’t know what ‘goodness’ is. Try as we might, we find all our answers are lacking in some way. We know it’s not just our evolved dispositions or social conventions, because the inadequacy of those reductive answers can be exposed by Socratic questioning. But when we try to offer a better answer in their place we constantly run up against a limit to our understanding.
And yet we know that there is nothing more important than understanding what goodness is. We feel we must keep reaching for the answer, even if we know we can’t grasp it.Can’t we be content with that? Isn’t that the honest answer? Goodness is like the sun: we know it’s there by the light that it casts, but we can’t look directly at it. At best, we can look at the sun indirectly via reflections or the use of strong filters: we can see what goodness is by seeing its reflection in visible things, like acts of compassion or courage, or through the strong filter of technical moral philosophy that, of necessity, dims the light of goodness in order to look at it more directly.
Many Socratically-minded philosophers would say that this is exactly what a sincere attempt at moral philosophy looks like. There is no end-point to our attempts to gain greater moral understanding. Our moral understanding can deepen without limit. We cannot ‘finish’ that task. It is a task that we must attempt but know we cannot complete. That we don’t complete the task, and see clearly what the perfect idea of goodness is, is hardly surprising because we know that it’s a task that has no end. We should expect to not achieve our goal. It’s a mistake to think that we need to offer a final answer here: we can accept our ignorance, and with it accept the mystery about the Form of the Good. We don’t have to choose between a bad answer or a worse one, just for the sake of having an answer.
Reason and its Limits
The simple point, as I see it, recognised time and time again across the philosophical ages in ever increasing technical subtlety (in Plato, in Kant, in Wittgenstein), is that reason must have its limits. And if there are limits to reason, then when we encounter those limits we must simply accept that reason can go no further and what lies beyond is beyond reason’s power to express. Accepting that, we should stop saying anything more about it. To my mind, this is what Plato is doing when he holds back from offering an explanation of the Form of the Good. He knows that everything points to the Form of the Good, but he also knows that he cannot say exactly what it is. It is, quite literally, beyond the power of reason to do so.
Consider this more contemporary illustration of reductive limits: If you are so reductively inclined, you can say that sociology is nothing but applied psychology; you can say that psychology is nothing but applied biology; you can say that biology is nothing but applied chemistry; you can say that chemistry is nothing but applied physics; you can say that physics is nothing but applied mathematics; you can say that mathematics is nothing but applied logic; you can say that logic is nothing but applied reason; but what comes next? What is reason ‘nothing but’ applied…? You can gesture towards the ideas of Rightness, Truth, or the Good, but, being only able to express these in the most fundamental terms of reason at its limits, you must accept reason’s limits and confine the true nature of these ideas into a realm of essential mystery. It is, literally, beyond reason.
Kant said it best, in the closing remarks of his 18th century Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. When philosophy goes looking for the limits of human reason and finds them: of anything that lies beyond those limits, the most we can ask is that we comprehend its incomprehensibility.
Platonism
For all this dependence on mystery, many things remain clear: knowledge of the Good now has a metaphysical explanation, in Plato’s world. It is not a practical or down-to-earth matter, as Socrates might have seen it. Plato’s placing of the ‘Form of the Good’ at the top of the metaphysical hierarchy seems to me to be the more theoretically-minded Plato’s way of making sense of his practically-minded teacher’s claim that ‘everything depends on the ethical’, without abandoning it, yet incorporating it into the elaborate metaphysical system that Plato has come to understand. But because of this transformation of the priority of the ethical into a priority of a metaphysical idea, what was once a command to be good has now become a command to know the good. This marks the final shift from the more practical and down-to-earth ethical nature of Socrates’ thought to the more metaphysical thought of Plato.
Knowledge is Power
Given the rather ‘other-worldly’ and metaphysical nature of Plato’s mature philosophy, and the inevitable casting of philosophers as ‘good-for-nothings’, you might be thinking by now that it has little to teach us about how to live well. But you’d be wrong about that, because there is one very important lesson to learn from it: in order to live well, you should trust only your reason.
There are two ways to come to this conclusion that in order to live well you must prioritise reason, and each might have its own power for you. One route is via Plato’s distinction between the visible world and the intelligible world. The theoretical background for this has been well covered up to this point and so, the path having been mapped out, we can leave an exploration of this route for the next section where we will explore the practical applications of Plato’s philosophy.
The second route requires a little more theoretical background, a little more mapping, since it takes root in Plato’s political philosophy. It is the final theoretical piece in the Platonic puzzle of how to live well as a human being.
Happiness Through Politics
It might sound odd to say that Plato’s discussion of political philosophy shows us important truths about how to live well. How is criticising democracy going to help me overcome my anxiety or depression?! For many of us, thinking about politics is likely to make us feel more anxious and depressed, not less. But it makes more sense when you consider why Plato is discussing political philosophy in the first place.
Plato is looking for an answer to age-old Socratic question ‘what is it to live well as a human being?’. Perhaps we suspect, with Socrates, that this involves the virtues like justice, courage, or temperance, but what are these virtues? Plato recognises that answering these questions directly is difficult because the answers are difficult to see. How can we make it easier to see?
One way that we can make something easier to see is to make it larger. Imagine you are short-sighted and struggling to read some small text. If only the letters were larger, then it would be easier to read! If you had a larger version of the small text you are trying to read, you could read that larger version first, see it clearly, then you’d only have to compare it with the smaller version and see if it’s similar. That would be a lot easier than reading the small text outright. How can we do something similar for our ideas about virtue? How can we get a bigger image of ‘justice’ or ‘courage’ or ‘living well as a human being’, in order that we can see them more clearly? How can we see these things on a larger scale?
What if, rather than looking at what it is for a human being to live well, we looked at what it is for many human beings to live well? Wouldn’t that give us a bigger, scaled-up image of what we’re looking for? ‘Many’ is bigger than ‘one’, after all, and bigger things are, as a rule, easier to see. We already have these images in groups like families, communities, villages, tribes, cities, and nation states. These ‘larger images’ are much easier to see than the ‘smaller image’ of an individual human life.
And wouldn’t we say that these larger images, these groups of people, can be described as virtuous in exactly the same way as the smaller image of the individual person? Can nation states not be described as virtuous or vicious, courageous or cowardly, conservative or liberal, just or unjust?
Plato thinks we can do just this: by looking at the ‘larger image’ of the nation state, we can more clearly see what it is to live well as human beings. Once we have that larger image, we can then scale it down to the smaller image of the individual human being and apply what we have learnt.
When Plato looks at this larger image, in his political philosophy, he sees a well-functioning state as one that is composed of various parts: the parts that rule, the parts that protect, and the parts that provide. In simple terms, these are the rulers, the warriors, and the workers. The rulers decide what should be done and give instructions. The warriors obey and enforce these instructions, and protect the rulers and workers. The workers provide food and any other material goods, under the protection and enforcement of the warriors. A well-functioning society is one in which each part fulfils their role in harmony with the whole.
In order for this to be harmonious, each part much be content to play their part. This means people should do what they are naturally best suited to do and society should encourage them in this direction. If you are naturally angry and violent, you are ill-suited to make ceramic pots or tend to animals, but you would make a good warrior. If you are naturally timid and conscientious, you would make a lousy warrior, but you might make a very good artisan. There are attributes that are more or less suitable for each part in society. Warriors should be brave, strong, loyal, and patriotic, but they should not be motivated by money or else they will be vulnerable to bribes; farmers should be patient, hard-working, conscientious, but they need not concern themselves with anything beyond their patch of land; traders should be motivated by money, but they must be fair-minded or else timid enough to fear enforcement; artisans should be skilled and creative, but they need not be particularly strong or brave. The virtues of each are determined by the role they play in society. Who would make a good ruler? For Plato, it can only be the philosopher.
The role of the ruler is to decide what to do and give instructions. It’s important that they know what they’re doing. Only a philosopher, via their knowledge of the Forms, understands the world as it really ‘is’ as opposed to how it ‘seems’, and so only they have accurate knowledge: everyone else is living in the shadow world of the cave. We should put those who know best in charge and this means that only philosophers should rule.
Most of Plato’s political philosophy is about showing the disastrous consequences of allowing anyone other than a philosopher to be in charge. I’ll paraphrase and sketch for the sake of brevity, since this is not an introduction to political philosophy, but even in its sketchiest paraphrasing his point is compelling and prescient.
If you put a trader and money-maker in charge, they will use their position to amass personal wealth, the society will become dominated by the desire for material wealth, and everything will suffer: farmers cash in on the most productive output, neglecting the long-term health of their land and livestock, leading to famine; artisans don’t make the best but only the best-selling, leading to a gradual decline in prices (and quality), and they suffer more and more in their work as it becomes a soulless grind; warriors sell their services to the highest bidder, even if this means protecting the unjust. The rich get richer and use their riches to oppress the poor, who only get poorer. Eventually, the poor rebel violently, if they can.
If you put a warrior in charge, they will use their position to enhance only their glorious reputation, society will be dominated by a lust for glory, and everything will suffer: warriors will be more concerned with outcompeting each other, rather than the enemy; traders and money-makers will waste money on outlandish displays of status, and will be free to trade injustice for the material means of displaying status; the society will find itself dragged into needless and damaging wars, because a warrior always needs an enemy to fight against in order to prove their strength and gain glory. The warrior cannot stand someone else being above them, so gradually takes more and more power for themselves, gradually exerts more and more power over others. They become a tyrant. Eventually, the powerless rebel violently, if they can.
And what about democracy? For Plato, democracy is the worst form of government, worse than all the others, because it is so vulnerable to corruption. As a form of government, it lacks direction and cares little for the truth. If you put the people in charge then those people will, knowing no better, vote for pleasant-seeming cave-shadows over truths that they do not understand. Those who want power know this, and can easily manipulate those cave-shadows to their purposes. Traders and money-makers use the will of the people to make more money; warriors and glory-seekers use the will of the people to justify war; etc., etc. According to Plato, democracy is nothing other than a rule by the mob, and the mob is perpetually vulnerable to being led astray by a charismatic but self-interested person who wants power at any cost. This will inevitably lead to chaos and tyranny.
Plato’s views on democracy are dated. Most modern democracies have managed to find ways to counteract the tendency to descend into chaos and tyranny. Even so, his criticisms continue to ring true, and they always ring truer when democracy creaks under the influence of charismatic but self-serving leadership contenders. You might be forgiven for thinking that this seems to be happening more and more. To my mind, it’s in these times that it’s important to remember the real virtue of democracy: The point of democracy is not to find the right answer, but to allow every individual to participate in their own government. We choose democracy not because it’s the best, but because its better than any alternative in which people are not permitted to govern themselves. People make mistakes in governing themselves all the time; why should we expect groups of people to be any different?
Let’s remember that Plato’s discussions of political philosophy had a purpose, and that purpose was to offer up a larger image of ‘virtue’ or ‘living well’ in the nation state in order to make it easier to see what ‘virtue’ or ‘living well’ was in an individual human life. We’ve seen that, in the state, ‘living well’ means each part playing its part. What can that mean for the individual human being?
The Tripartite Soul
Armed with his ‘larger image’ of the virtuous nation state, Plato looks to compare this with the smaller image of the individual human being. He finds them to be similar. Just as a society has its constituent parts, so too he sees an individual human being as having various parts that make it what it is. He uses a straightforward argument to demonstrate this.
Reflect on yourself: your personality, your desires, your actions and thoughts, your body, whatever you care to think of as being something that makes you what you are. Do you find it to be in unified agreement, pushing you in the one same direction, or do you find it to be in disagreement, pulling you in different directions at one time or another or even at the same time? For me, as I suspect would be true for many people, it is the latter. Most of the time I find myself being dragged in different directions for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes I want to do something because I think it is the right thing to do; other times I really don’t want to do something because it’s fearful or difficult; other times I want to do something because it’s comfortable and easy; other times I want to do something precisely because it’s difficult. I want cheese, but I also want to lower my body fat percentage. I want to be thought of as a good public speaker, but I don’t want to do any public speaking. I want to sit at home in my dressing gown, but I don’t want people to think I’m slovenly. Etc., etc. These are trivial examples but they make a point.
If I were a single unified thing, it would make sense that I would be in agreement with myself. It takes two to tango, as they say, and a disagreement is nothing more than a mismatch between two things. So if there is only one thing, there should be no disagreement. Or so reasons Plato.
Consider a simple illustration. Look at your hand. Move it around: the hand is moving. Hold it still: the hand is still. Can the hand be moving and still at the same time? No: if it’s moving, then it’s not still; if it’s still, then it’s not moving. It cannot contradict itself. But now move just a finger without moving the rest of the hand. Is the hand moving, or not? It’s not clear how to answer. The hand is still, at least compared to the finger, but the hand is moving because the finger is moving. It is in contradiction with itself. How do we resolve this contradiction? We say that the finger is merely a part of the hand. A part of the hand is moving, but the other parts of the hand are still. Thus, the hand is moving and the hand is still and we have resolved the contradiction. Plato applies a similar line of reasoning for the parts of the human soul. No one thing can be in contradiction with itself. But if there are parts to that thing, then those parts can differ and that can generate a disagreement within the whole.
So, given that I am often in disagreement with myself, it stands to reason that I cannot be a single unified thing: I must be a thing that has various parts. Each part wants distinct things and they are all competing for attention. It’s this that causes me to be dragged in different directions and for different reasons.
Cataloguing these parts in any great detail would be a big and very complicated task. Let’s leave that to the neuroscientists. And whatever answer they give, it’ll still be me who has to decide what to do with the data. A brain scan can show me how my mind is made up, but it cannot make up my mind for me.
What Plato offers – in a time long before neuroscience – is a simple but effective way of organising the parts of yourself based on what they want. Sometimes you want things that relate to bodily goods. These are the more evolutionarily ‘basic’ desires, you might think. It starts with food and water and shelter, but quickly mutates into a desire for pleasant tastes, sensations, and comfort. Colloquially, this means sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Or at least sitting on the sofa in a dressing gown eating pizza and watching TV. Your body is happy with this.
At other times you want more. You want respect, admiration, glory. You want to be liked. You want to have a certain standing in the world. You want to compete and win; you want to make yourself better so that you can compete and win. You want a reason to be proud of yourself. You want to be free. You want justice. None of these desires directly satisfy any bodily goods. Or at least, not in a way that’s obvious. They might still be driven by evolved dispositions, but we might say they come later in the evolutionary story. They are social goods, mainly.
Put an arbitrary label on each. Call the desires relating to bodily goods ‘appetite’ and the desires relating to non-bodily goods ‘spirit’. These are the parts of your self that disagree with one another. Your body wants cheese but your spirit wants to be lean. Your body wants to be calm, and wants to do whatever will make and keep it calm, but your spirit wants to be thought of as a good public speaker, even if that requires some anxious discomfort. Your body wants to be comfortable, but your spirit doesn’t want to be lazy.
What results is conflict within the self. How do we resolve this conflict? For Plato, the answer is obvious, and it comes by identifying a third part of our selves: the mind, or reasoning faculty. This part of ourselves wants only the truth. It just wants to know the right answer. There’s no glory in it, no bodily good, often no obvious reason for it at all, but it demands to be satisfied all the same.
This reasoning part of our selves can recognise the competing desires and weigh them against one another, ultimately deciding which desire should be followed.
We now have a directly analogy with Plato’s political philosophy. Each part of yourself serves its purpose for you in the same way as each part of society serves the purposes of the collective whole. Your bodily appetites are like the parts of society that provide material goods: they ensure you are fed and watered and rested, and that you have pleasant things to enjoy. Your ‘spirit’ is like the warrior, wanting to fight and win and gain glory, enforcing discipline and making you strong in order to defeat your enemies and protect you from harm. Finally, your mind or reasoning faculty is and ought to be the ruler, deciding what to do and giving instructions. It will weigh up the competing demands of the ‘appetite’ and ‘spirit’ and will balance them in the most harmonious way possible. A well-functioning human being is like a well-functioning state: each part fulfilling its role for the benefit of the whole.
In his political philosophy, Plato argues that only philosophers should be rulers because only they have knowledge enough to know what they’re doing. He says we will never be rid of our troubles until our kings are philosophers and our philosophers are kings. It is exactly the same story with an individual human being: we should put our inner philosopher in charge and rule ourselves by the power of reason.
When we do this, Plato thinks this reasoning faculty will give an obvious answer here, and has classically Greek reasons to prioritise the desires of ‘spirit’. We might feel a little differently nowadays, in our comfortably forgiving modern world, but we don’t need to agree with Plato’s conclusions to use the tripartite structure of the soul as a helpful tool for therapeutic reflection.
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