Episode # 004 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Hello, everyone. It’s me, Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! And I got to tell you, this episode was really close to being a two-part episode. Because when you’re dealing with philosophers that are as influential as Plato was and have a body of work as extensive as Plato’s is, it starts to become very difficult to make one single 45-minute conglomeration of all of it. On that same note, a guy named Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy subsequently after Plato consists of a set of footnotes to Plato and his work. Footnotes, that’s it. By the end of this episode, you’re going to understand why he said that. And hopefully you’ll understand why it was almost a two-parter.

Plato wrote 27 treatises, practically 27 full-length books. And the reason I decided to keep it down to one part is because I saw the content that was going to be in the second episode, and I asked myself, what would I want in a philosophy podcast? Now, I don’t think anyone here is listening to this podcast so they can one day be the curator of the Plato museum or something. I don’t think anyone wants to know what the guy’s favorite color was. You want to know the essentials.

What were his most notable contributions to philosophy—notable being ones that either ended up influencing future philosophers or shaping the world we live in? And now that we’re dealing with philosophers that have most of if not all of their work surviving to this day, we can’t cover everything. For example, Plato wrote a treatise about the nature of the physical world and human beings and the origins of the universe called the Timaeus. It’s brilliant. I mean, it’s fascinating, but not necessarily game changing in the philosophical world.

Plato experienced heartbreak in 399 BC. He watched from the sidelines in horror as his teacher, his friend, and mentor, Socrates was put on trial and convicted to death. And there was nothing he could do about it. He was angry with the city of Athens, and rightfully so. Their witch-hunt mentality following the Peloponnesian War killed his best friend. And he decided at that point he needed a little change of scenery, a 12-year change of scenery it turns out. It was like the movie Wild Hogs. He just left town crestfallen. He went on an extended road trip where he learned a lot about the world and a little about himself along the way.

It was a transformative road trip. It changed the entire way he looked at the world for the rest of his life. You could almost think of this road trip as an extension and finishing of his education. See, he studied under Socrates for a long time, learning the Socratic method and argument. And then he studied abroad like many do in school. He studied with Eukleides, Theodorus, the Pythagoreans. Some say he made it all the way to Egypt.

Now, what happened next is still open for debate. Some sources say he was captured towards the end of his road trip and sold into slavery, and then his friends rescued him and brought him back to Athens. Some say something else entirely triggered the event. But what is certain is that something made him decide in 387 BC to return to Athens and found his infamous school called the Academy, a school that would stay operational for almost 900 years in one form or another, a school whose name is where we get our modern word “academic.” He took it upon himself with this new school of his to not only catalog the thoughts of his beloved teacher Socrates but to also foster and develop future philosophers.

But Plato wasn’t satisfied with the definition of the word “philosopher.” You remember Pythagoras’ view that it’s a lover of wisdom. That wasn’t good enough for him. He felt more was necessary to be a good candidate to go to his school. Plato didn’t like how the definition of philosopher included people that just always loved to hear a new fact. I mean, I’m sure we’ve all known someone like who he’s talking about.

Some guy goes to the grocery store, buys a Diet Peach Snapple, looks under the cap and sees, “Did you know your body is made up of 80% water?” and then runs around telling everybody about it. Personally, I have no problem with this guy, and neither does Plato, for that matter, aside from the annoying evangelizing of a random fact. Plato just didn’t think this guy should be considered a philosopher.

Plato would see him as a sightseer or someone who enjoys wisdom for the practical benefits or the spectacle, not the wisdom itself. Plato thought non-philosophers live in a sort of dreamlike state. They see things they think are beautiful and then naïvely think that the objects themselves encompass what beauty is. Really, Plato thought, if they looked a little deeper, what they would see is beauty itself. He didn’t think to be a philosopher you should be pursuing wisdom because you love to revel in the fact of the day. A true philosopher is someone who uses their brain merely as a tool in the process of arriving at wisdom.

Now, developing future philosophers through his school was only half of his initial plan. He was also committed to continuing the work of his friend and mentor, Socrates. And as we talked about last episode, he wrote the Apology, which was the story of Socrates’ trial, defense, and conviction. But he was nowhere near done preserving his name. See, Plato was another one of these brilliant philosophers that chose to write down their work in an entertaining and sometimes poetic way to try to get people to listen to the ideas underneath the story.

For the record, Plato was really good at it. I mean, he was a philosopher, but many historians say that his writing is the best writing in all of ancient Greece, even better than famous poets like Homer and Hesiod. And personally, I agree. You have to read some of this stuff, guys. It’s truly amazing. You can even buy them in paperback at Barnes & Noble now. Even the modern translations keep your interest, which is saying something considering it was meant to keep the interest of people that lived thousands of years ago. It’s really high-quality stuff.

A lot of what made it so entertaining was that he wrote it as a story with people just having normal conversations about normal things and then, eventually, casually weaving in a philosophical discussion about some abstract idea. Plato would use real people, real names, real personalities of people that lived at the time, and use them as a mouthpiece to deliver his philosophy.

A guy I went to school with said to me once that Plato’s writing is like crossover fan fiction. And it’s true. This is a great modern comparison, actually. For anyone that doesn’t know, crossover fan fiction would be like if a crazed fan wrote a short story about Edward and Bella from the Twilight franchise enrolling at Hogwarts and playing Quidditch with Harry Potter. Plato would have different philosophers and different public figures having conversations that they never actually had, sometimes even people that didn’t even live at the same time as each other.

Plato would oftentimes need a character in these stories that people could perceive as the quintessentially wise person. And whenever that demand arose, he chose to evoke the name of the wisest person he knew, Socrates. He was consciously typecasting Socrates as a wise person in every book so that the legacy of Socrates would be that he was a wise person, kind of like how certain actors are typecast in modern movies. Like, if I saw Michael Cera walking down the street, I would instantly jump to a conclusion and assume that he’s a meek, reserved person. I don’t know Michael Cera. Really, the only thing that tells me is, he plays that character really well in movies.

Plato was no doubt deliberately doing this in the case of Socrates though—making him the wise man in his dialogues to leave a legacy. Unfortunately, it led to a little bit of confusion. Socrates was a philosopher himself. And he never wrote anything down. So, by making him the central character in a dialogue that’s actually conveying Plato’s philosophy, it can sometimes be difficult to discern which views are the views of Socrates and which are the views of Plato himself. Twenty-seven treatises, and all these are separated down into three distinct periods based on when they were written. And each of these periods mark large changes in Plato’s way of thinking and the subject matters he covered.

See, in Plato’s early dialogues he deals with issues that concerned Socrates exclusively. Not only that, but he addressed them in a way that Socrates would have addressed them, his Socratic method. It’s almost like he felt an obligation to carry on Socrates’ legacy after he was put to death. But then throughout the chronology of his writing, the Socrates in his writing starts dealing with more issues of government, metaphysical claims, etc. The fact that Socrates changes and is a completely different person in one writing as opposed to another writing—it shows the progression of Plato as a philosopher.

And to be honest, it really doesn’t matter that much. Socrates wouldn’t have been offended. Socrates wasn’t the kind of guy that had a set of unfaltering beliefs anyway. Remember, he vehemently swore that he knew nothing and was always trying to get to the bottom of what things actually were. What Plato has succeeded in doing in this case is to keep the spirit of Socrates alive, the ever-changing, ever-questioning spirit of the Socratic method.

An example of this continuation of Socrates and the way he did philosophy lies in one of Plato’s treatises from the early years called the Symposium. The Symposium is one of Plato’s most famous works. And keep in mind, all the characters from this dialogue are written by Plato. Just consider the sheer genius of how well he encapsulates each of the characters and the reputation that they had at the time writing years later, probably decades later depending on who you believe. And it’s not like he had a private stenographer sitting in the room. Try recounting a conversation you had 15 years ago.

The word “symposium” means a drinking party. Plato writes about a fancy dinner party where several people take turns after dinner standing up in front of the group and giving their thoughts on and trying to get to one of these deep Socratic definitions of the concept of love—you know, how it starts, what the end goal is when you love someone, whether it overall is actually a benefit to mankind or not. And there were all kinds of people at this dinner party he wrote about, generals like Alcibiades, playwrights like Aristophanes and, most notably, Socrates.

So, Aristophanes, being a playwright that writes comedy, he fittingly gives a quasi-humorous and metaphorical account for what love is. He talks about a time when men and women were actually fused together. They had two heads, four arms, four legs. We were actually in a spherical shape, and we would roll around everywhere. Apparently, there were three sexes back then too. You could be all male, all female, and then androgenous or like a hermaphrodite, like half male, half female. The all-male forms were said to have descended from the sun, the females from earth, and the androgenous couples from the moon.

Apparently, when we had four arms and rolled around everywhere, we were also a little feisty too, because something happened where we tried to take over the god realm. And Zeus was just about to throw lightning at us and kill us all, but he decided—I mean, he wanted too, but he didn’t want to deprive himself of all the offerings and sacrifices that humans were going to give him, so he just set his lightning bolts from kill to stun mode and separated us in half. That way they could get twice the offerings they were getting before.

So, Aristophanes refers to sexual attraction or erotic love as the desire humans have to find their other half. They may seek it out for their entire lives without finding it, but the urges and feelings that attach us to people is our way of trying to get back our other half that was taken from us. Apparently, this is also why people often say they feel whole when they’re in love with someone. To put it another way, Aristophanes believes love is actually a quest, a pursuit to fill areas that you’re lacking in that once were yours.

Later on in the dinner party, Socrates doesn’t agree with him. He agrees that it’s a quest, but he doesn’t think we love something because at one point it belonged to us. He thinks we love something because we find it beautiful or good. Socrates breaks down the concept of love and tries to distill it down to its essence, as he would, right? He claims to have gotten this enlightened account of what love is from a conversation he once had with an older priestess. He explains it like this.

Man seeks immortality. We can’t live forever. That is certain. So, what we all do is seek alternative forms of immortality. And Plato saw these alternative forms as coming down to one of three things. Firstly, you could have children. You know, a little piece of you is passed through them and then again through their children, so you live forever in a way. Secondly, by doing some really noteworthy thing that gets you famous and written down in the history books. Or thirdly, you can create some body of work that’s evergreen or important enough that future generations hold it up in high regard—like Plato’s Symposium, ironically enough.

All three of these things are creating offspring—either physical offspring made with someone you love or intellectual offspring where we use our desire for being loved to motivate us to achieve these things, almost like we’re peacocks and the things we accomplish intellectually are colorful feathers we’re adding to our tail. Now, these people that we want love from, we think they’re beautiful. But to Plato, they’re just inferior copies of an ideal form of beauty which we’ll touch on later. But what he’s basically saying is that we accomplish what we choose to accomplish in life—you know, our careers, our cars, our children—we do all of this out of a love of beauty that we then transmute into motivation to get things done.

Now, I know what some of you are saying. Well, that isn’t love. That’s lust, or whatever you want to call it. You’re right. Plato thought this was only the first step on a staircase of love. Love can be broken down into a few different stages, each stage leading to the next stage and eventually coming to a head at the appreciation of the ideal form of beauty itself. It starts with a love of the person’s body, or exotic love. This is both sexual attraction or just thinking a person is an attractive person, like what we just talked about.

He says that after a while of this, you eventually realize that someone you think is beautiful has a lot in common with all the other people who you think are beautiful, therefore making this really hot person not as much of a rare Pokémon. There’s tons of them. Then once you realize this, you realize that all the variants that the body can have that makes it beautiful is nothing in comparison to the variants of things that can make the soul beautiful—or more simply to us modern folk, their personality. Then the yardstick you use to measure whether someone is beautiful or not has everything to do with their personality, even if that personality exists inside of a mangled or ugly body.

Eventually, you begin to transcend even the personality and stop loving individual people that inhabit an individual body. You start to love even broader things like concepts themselves. You’ll fall in love with things like the arts or certain laws. You’ll fall in love with a law or biology or things like that. And then, finally, at the top of the staircase you fall in love with the ideal form of beauty itself.

Socrates says that if it’s possible to live life anywhere, it’s here at the top of the staircase. Because when you’re in love with a single human being, you’re vulnerable. They could leave you. They could die or go live on a farm upstate like my dog did. It’s a painful life of servitude to this person. Whereas loving the form of beauty itself, you never feel vulnerable because it’s eternal and unchanging. It’s never going to give you up. It’s never going to let you down. But here’s the problem. It will never love you back. And you know this. It’s a perfect, eternal structure. It doesn’t have any use for love. It doesn’t have a use for a quest searching for something it’s lacking. It’s perfect.

This is what’s known as platonic love, and it wasn’t just intended to be used to find a life partner. And we wouldn’t use it anyway. We have eHarmony for that now. It was also supposed to be used to look past superficial properties of laws or people in government or even things like bridges. Do these things just appear to be beautiful or of substance, or should their worth be judged by the qualities that actually vary between them and other things?

Like, I could dress up like a UFC fighter. I could wear the affliction shirts. I could buy a hat. I could stack some encyclopedias on the bill of it so it’s as flat as a UFC fighter’s hat when they’re walking out. But examine me a little closer—and I do mean a little closer because I’m not fooling anyone, by the way—and you’ll find out that I don’t know how to fight whatsoever. And Dana White is never going to book me for a main event fight because there’s no substance behind the look.

So, eventually Plato got tired of dealing with just moral issues and started trying to answer questions like the Presocratics were trying to answer—you know, about what the cosmos is made out of and how did it get here. And it’s kind of funny, he arrived at the same conclusion about both. Morals and concepts like justice and beauty are eternal and not defined by the perception of one person that sees them. And he thought that nature and the things we saw were the exact same way—eternal, unchanging, and not based on perception.

Plato agreed with Socrates that finding the eternal definition of things like justice was an extremely important thing. Because how can you philosophize about something accurately if you don’t even understand the definition of the concepts you’re philosophizing about? How can you talk about justice without knowing exactly what justice is? To Plato, the entire quest of trying to find the definitions of these things should be done through the Socratic method—two or more people discussing something with no malicious intentions or horse in the race, but just giving their best guess based on their own experiences, and having the other guy nitpick it relentlessly.

But he also asked the question—my guess is after being completely frustrated after years of wondering what anything actually is—that if we arrived at the perfect, eternal definition of justice or beauty or whatever, how would we even be able to recognize that it was the end-all-be-all perfect form of it and not just some flawed perception like we usually have? But not just the perfect form of moral concepts, how about the perfect form of everyday objects? I mean, what is a tree exactly, right? What is a photograph exactly? Is there a perfect definition of what the essence of a tree is?

Plato thought, just as there is an elusive, difficult-to-define version of what justice is, there’s an elusive, difficult-to-define version of what a tree is, or all physical objects for that matter—a perfect tree—and that all trees we see around us are just inferior copies of that perfect tree. To put it another way, he describes it like this: when we see a tree, we know it’s a tree. We can recognize a tree when we see one. But trees are all very different. No two of them are the same. One may have, you know, like a knot here or a random branch there. Some trees may have one kind of bark or one kind of leaves. There’s a lot of different kinds of trees. But we still recognize it as a tree because it has a sort of tree-y-ness.

For anyone wondering, if it means anything, I’m the moron that decided to use tree as an example, so I’d have to say the word “tree-y-ness.” Plato in his work used dogs and doggy-ness or something. But we can recognize tree-y-ness—you know, that thing that makes a tree a tree—we recognize it at some level and attach a definition to a tree.

So, if we analyze what the essence of a tree is long enough, we can understand what a tree is by definition, right? We can conceive of what the perfect tree really is. But does it actually exist anywhere in the world? No. Plato thought that that perfect tree along with the perfect forms of everything else that exists, including the concepts of justice and beauty, exist in a magical world of forms that’s completely separate from the material world that we live in.

Humans can’t see or smell or touch the world of forms, but they can think really hard for a really long time about the definitions of these things or concepts and access the world of forms through reason. Not only that but, to Plato, the world of forms is the true reality and that the entire world we live in and everything in it, including people and trees and dogs—they’re all just inferior copies of the quintessential person, the quintessential tree and the quintessential dog that exists in the world of forms.

This concept is known as his theory of forms. And it’s a pretty strange way of looking at the world and all the things in it. So, to try to put it into context, let me explain it like this. This is usually the point in the podcast where I go into some long-winded example that no one understands trying to relate the material to you guys. But luckily for me, Plato did it for me. Except his isn’t incomprehensible at all. It’s actually so genius it’s the thing he’s most known for. It’s called his Allegory of the Cave.

Here's a quote from it. “Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.”

To Plato, typical human existence is a pretty depressing thing. So, imagine if from the moment you were born you were tied up and held prisoner inside of a dark cave, being forced to face the dark back wall of that cave. Now, some translations say the light source is a fire. Some say it’s only the sun. But either way, shadows are cast of you and the other prisoners tied up around you onto the back wall of the cave. Now, also, for the sake of including all the other things in the world, Plato includes that there’s also a pathway between you and the fire where people walk by, and every so often they hold up an everyday item like a tree or a dog so that the shadow of that tree or dog is cast on the back wall of the cave.

Plato says that if you talked to the prisoners, they would have no idea about the world that’s going on behind them. From birth, the only thing they’ve ever seen or known about are the shadows of the actual items being cast on the cave wall. He compares the everyday experience that humans have. Seeing a tree or a dog in the real world is like seeing the shadow of the actual item on the cave wall.

He continues by saying that if a prisoner manages to untie himself and turn around and look at the actual items and see the fire—or in some translations he would leave the cave and eventually see the sun, which symbolizes complete truth—he’d be confused, and his eyes would strain at the sun. And most likely he would just turn back around, stick to the shadows on the cave wall, because it’s the existence he’s known for so long. Not to mention, he’d probably feel really dumb he’s been sitting there since he was a baby and could have untied himself this whole time and didn’t realize it.

Plato thought that everything on earth that we had the ability to perceive with our senses had a corresponding form in the world of forms. When we use our senses to perceive something—like when we see it, smell it, or touch it—we’re essentially seeing shadows on the cave wall. The only true way to know what something is is to untie yourself and turn around and see them for what they actually are. And the way you do that is through reason and thought.

Remember how philosophers like Democritus and Empedocles were just trying to find a compromise that accounted for the changing world we perceive, as opposed to Parmenides’ idea that the world is eternal and unchanging. Well, with Plato’s theory of forms, he was basically doing the same thing. The material world that we live in and perceive—or the shadows on the cave wall—is seemingly changing. But true reality is in a completely separate, eternal, unchanging world, the world of forms.

He thought it was a philosopher’s job to identify as many of these forms as they can in life. Being able to untie yourself and see the truth for what it actually is gives a person a unique perspective of understanding that no one else around them possesses. It’s kind of like watching a football game with a pro football player sitting right next to you. Like, you guys are both watching the exact same game, but he sees so much more than you do. He understands subtleties and strategy that you’re completely ignorant to. Plato thought true wisdom did this with all the things we see in the world.

Here's another quote from the Republic about a prisoner that manages to untie themself. “While still blinking through the gloom, and before he has become sufficiently accustomed to the environing darkness, he is compelled in court rooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the images that cast the shadows and to wrangle and debate about the notions of these things in the minds of those who have never seen justice itself.”

Now, it’s important to note, there’s a lot of really smart people that don’t think Plato literally thought that a separate world existed with perfect forms of everything just floating around everywhere. They say he probably was just stating in a melodramatic way that concepts like justice or beauty exist independent of just actions or beautiful things. Human beings commonly mistake just actions and the definition of justice as being the same thing. I mean, he did speak of a different heaven-like world. But really, he may have just been marking a contrast between considering what is a just action here and now and what is the eternal, unchanging definition of justice regardless of time and place.

But there’s one glaring problem with his theory of forms and the Allegory of the Cave. How can we even know what the ideal form of anything is? How can we know the difference between reasoning to an imperfect form of a tree or reasoning to a perfect form of a tree? Plato says that, although we don’t realize it, we’re all born with knowledge of everything in the world of forms. Or as he put it, what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

He thought that human beings could be broken down into two separate parts—the body and the soul. The body is responsible for the inferior senses, the things we use to perceive the world around us in a flawed way. The soul, on the other hand, has the ability to reason, and we use the soul to perceive the world of forms. He thought that our soul is eternal and at one point lived in the world of forms before we were born, and it really wants to go back. So, when we see a tree with our senses, we recognize that it’s a tree, but we need to use our soul or reason to remember exactly what a tree is.

The idea that learning is just a process of recollection is called his theory of innate knowledge. And he tells a story supposedly proving it to be true about Socrates talking to his friend Meno while simultaneously teaching a slave boy who doesn’t really understand anything about math, but Socrates is going to help him remember what he was born with.

Here’s a quote from it.

“Socrates: Come now, try to tell me how long each side of this will be. The side of this is two feet. What about each side of the one which is its double?

Boy: Obviously, Socrates, it would be twice the length.

Socrates: You see, Meno, that I am not teaching the boy anything, but all I do is question him. And now he thinks he knows the length of the line on which an eight-foot figure is based. Do you agree?

Meno: I do.

Socrates: And does he know?

Meno: Certainly not.

Socrates: He thinks it is a line twice the length?

Meno: Yes.

Socrates: Watch him now recollecting things in order as one must recollect. Tell me, boy, do you say that a figure double the size is based on a line double the length? Now I mean such a figure as this, not long on one side and short on the other, but equal in every direction like this one and double the size, that is, eight feet.”

He goes on for a while never teaching the boy anything but asking questions and getting the boy to arrive at new conclusions all on his own. This is a great example of the Socratic method of questioning at work and a great example of Socrates being a midwife for ideas like we talked about last episode. You can really see in this story that the boy had no idea what the answer was before Socrates questioned him. And then Socrates gives birth to new ideas, just as he claimed to do when he was questioning people on the streets of Athens. Plato thought this story and the fact that the slave boy was told nothing but was somehow able to arrive at a new understanding was proof that we’re born with total knowledge of everything in the world of forms and that understanding the world of forms is just a process of using your soul’s ability to reason to remember them.

The theory of forms may seem a little weird. That’s because it is. And if you gave Plato enough time, he may have agreed with you. The theory went through several different stages where certain aspects of it changed throughout his life, no doubt because other philosophers would argue about it with him, and he’d recognize there was a problem with it and try to adapt to account for it. But he was the first one to designate what the path to having true knowledge was. Yeah, he was addressing the sophist idea of relativism which led him to base his thoughts on something eternal like the theory of forms. But this was a breakthrough in epistemology.

Epistemology, simply put, is what do we know and how do we know it. And although we’ve heard several other philosophers echo the concept of the senses being inferior to reason when trying to arrive at knowledge of the world we live in, Plato’s explanation for why it is better really sets him apart. And because of this, he’s usually credited with single-handedly laying the groundwork for 17th century rationalism.

Now, Plato wasn’t done changing philosophy just yet. He even had a lot to say about the role of government in a civilized society. Plato was an aristocratic elitist that hated democracy. The conviction of Socrates probably added to this. But his thinking was, just like there’s an ideal form of justice or beauty, Plato says there’s an ideal form of government. And he crafts a sort of utopia laying out exactly what the ideal government would be and why it should be that way.

The biggest problem he saw was with the leadership that’s typically elected to office. Here he’s giving an account of why leaders never seem to get things done. “Such was the conviction I had when I arrived in Italy and Sicily for the first time. When I arrived and saw what they call there the ‘happy life’—a life filled with Italian and Syracusan banquets, with men gorging themselves twice a day and never sleeping alone at night, and following all the other customs that go with this way of living—I was profoundly displeased. For no man under heaven who has cultivated such practices from his youth could possibly grow up to be wise—so miraculous a temper is against nature—or become temperate, or indeed acquire any other part of virtue.”

People that are born into a rich lifestyle of indulgence, in Plato’s eyes, were among the worst that could ever possibly govern a population. Plato’s idea of what an ideal city is starts at the beginning of the Republic, one of his treatises, where the character Socrates comes across a guy named Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus tells Socrates that morality is nothing more than a set of rules forced upon the weak by strong people who have the power to impose them. He thinks if you can break the law and get away with it, you should. And if you can change rules and get a bunch of people to follow suit, you should do that too. He finishes by saying that a man who acts morally always ends up worse off than a guy who acts immorally or, to put it in modern terms, nice guys finish last.

Socrates doesn’t have much to say then, but in the interest of getting to the bottom of it, after Thrasymachus had left, his friends play devil’s advocate and try to argue against Socrates and get him to explain why it isn’t true. Socrates explains not by pointing out the merits of an individual that acts justly but by pointing out the merits of a just state or a system of government that acts justly. He says that it’ll be easier to understand if looked at on a broader scale. Plato is not only going to point out what the ideal form of government is, but he’s also going to make a case for why it’s in your own self-interest to act morally simultaneously in a single writing tackling two gigantic tasks that have plagued brilliant humans ever since. This is why Plato is amazing, by the way, right there.

So, first, Plato defines what the ideal city would need to have. It would need a police force or some sort of protective enforcement to protect it from invaders and to prevent civil wars from breaking out. Then he goes on to say that everyone should work in the area that best accentuates the individual gifts they have. For example, if you’re naturally gifted at math, you would work in the math field. If you’re naturally gifted in the arts, you would be an artist, etc.

Now, honestly, I know we’re talking about a utopia here and it isn’t necessarily viable in the real world, but doesn’t it greatly benefit society to have things this way? I mean, it really makes you wonder how many super geniuses that could have cured diseases ended up being dishwasher manager at Taco Bell. The potential of a society with this idea in place is endless. And whenever I think about it in action, I think of a scene from a movie about a completely different area of Greece that was facing conquest.

[Begin Audio Clip from 300]

Daxos: We heard Sparta was on the warpath. We were eager to join forces.

King Leonidas: If it is blood you seek, you’re welcome to join us.

Daxos: But you bring only this handful of soldiers against Xerxes? I see I was wrong to expect Sparta’s commitment to at least match our own.

King Leonidas: Doesn’t it? You there, what is your profession?

Free Greek-Potter: I’m a potter, sir.

King Leonidas: And you, Arcadian, what is your profession?

Free Greek-Sculptor: Sculptor, sir.

King Leonidas: And you?

Free Greek-Blacksmith: Blacksmith.

King Leonidas: Spartans! What is your profession?!

Spartans: HA-OOH! HA-OOH! HA-OOH!

King Leonidas: You see, old friend? I brought more soldiers than you did.

[End Audio Clip from 300]

So, in this scene, King Leonidas comes across the Arcadians on the way to Thermopylae. And the Arcadians point out that he only brought 300 soldiers, and they’re shocked. They don’t know how they’re ever going to beat Xerxes. But Leonidas points out, the Arcadians didn’t bring any soldiers; they brought potters and blacksmiths. By having specialization in a society that accentuates the natural gifts of the population, how can you lose? And let’s be honest, those 300 Spartans would have stopped Xerxes easy if Quasimodo hadn’t led them through the mountains.

Plato even said women would have the ability to work their way up in the city just as much as men would, which was an unprecedented belief back then. Plato’s city would be made up of a hierarchical class structure that would consist of three classes: the producers, which were like farmers, blacksmiths, artisans, you know, the working class; and the other two were the guardians and the rulers. The rulers would be chosen from the best guardians, and the guardians would be chosen from children that looked like they would be good rulers with the right training and guidance.

Plato noticed that it’s always when rulers act selfishly or immorally that the problems start to arise for the population. So, if all the rulers were chosen from the guardians, and the guardians are in a sort of interim bootcamp phase, they would have a much better stock to pull from. But the training and guidance of these guardians needed to be perfect. They were cultivating their future president after all. So, all the guardians would live a communal lifestyle with no private property, which even goes for their wives and children. They were forbidden to touch or own silver or gold or any other riches.

All of these precautions were taken so they didn’t have something to corrupt them. The only motivating aspect should be the improvement of the state. They would be strictly regulated when it came to diet, exercise, and even the type of songs or poems they heard in their malleable years. They would make sure all the stories they heard had the main character or hero of the story acting in the way they would want one of their leaders to act.

In short, his utopia would involve spoon-feeding only positive influences to children from a very young age in an attempt to remove them from their ego, fabricate a moral compass, and teach them to think rationally, all in an attempt to eventually yield a leader that would be flawless. Plato says that this would be the ideal form of a city—specialization, each person using their natural gifts and capabilities to their highest potential.

He continues making his case by saying that a just city has all of its parts working together well, and this is comparable to a human being who has all of their parts working together well. And just as the city has three classes, the human soul has three parts as well. Firstly, the appetitive part of the soul, which is the desire for sex or money, which is comparable to the producers who live as they do to make money. Secondly, the spirited part of the soul, which wants honor, fame, or notoriety, and is comparable to the class of the guardians. And lastly, the rational part of the soul, which desires knowledge and is comparable to the ruling class.

He compares the ideal state of a city to the ideal state of a human being. The human shouldn’t let his desires for sex or food or fame or glory overtake him. He should make decisions based on reason. This is the same reason why cities should be ruled by reason or people cultivated to think purely rationally.

Plato thought that the only way for this system of government to ever be implemented would be for the public to elect philosophers as their kings or for the current kings to educate themselves in the area of philosophy. These people that used reason to untie themselves from the back wall of the cave and see the absolute truth—Plato thought that wisdom earned them the stamp of the ruler. The way he saw it, who better to rule everyone than someone who understands the exact definition of moral values or what justice or fairness is, instead of flawed people ruling everyone that always impose their biased and oftentimes corrupt views on the entire populace?

This supreme form of government that I just laid out is what Plato would call an aristocracy. Plato thought the less excited people were to be a leader, the better things would inevitably turn out. An aristocracy is ruled by a philosopher king and, therefore, is managed by wisdom and reason. Plato thought there were five main types of regimes that could potentially govern a society, and they were on a hierarchy from best to worst. And he explains how each form of government subsequently devolves into the next worst form of government.

The five in order were an aristocracy—that was the best. Then that devolves into a timocracy. Then that devolves into an oligarchy. Then that devolves into a democracy, and then lastly tyranny. Now, the meanings of these five types of governments are not even close to the modern definitions of them. But there are enough similarities for us to understand what he means and see his brilliance.

The aristocracy is the best form of government and devolves into a timocracy when someone misjudges who a good candidate for the guardian position would be. So, instead of getting someone who’s completely removed from their ego and rational, you get someone who may still be incredibly smart and rational, but their main driving force is not the acquisition of knowledge; it’s the acquisition of honor. Still pretty noble, but not as noble as knowledge. This form of government is also known as a military dictatorship. This love of conquest causes them to allow themselves to own property, usually through military conquest. And this was actually the system of government in Sparta at the time.

Then the timocracy eventually devolves into an oligarchy. And Plato saw this happening because as the desire for honor comes into play, doing something in one’s self-interest always keeps going. And doing things in the desire of money is the next logical step in the equation. The people in power want to protect their financial interests. So they make it a rich-ruling-the-poor sort of dynamic, and that’s what an oligarchy is. They still have some morals. I mean, they’re thrifty, but only for the cause of saving money not being wise or for the benefit of the city. The people in the oligarchy admire power and money, so they put the rich in office and despise the poor. This form of government is destined to fail because eventually class warfare will erupt. And the rich will be against the poor, and there will always be more poor than rich.

So, then, what inevitably happens is, the poor revolt, and the oligarchy devolves into a democracy, or a society ruled by the masses. When you’re in a democracy, freedom is seen as the supreme good. And back in Plato’s time, people in a democracy were seen as self-indulgent, focused on immediate gratification of food, sex, and other short-term pleasures. And he saw the democratic state as an undisciplined pandemonium.

When freedom is the most important tenant of a society, eventually, Plato thought, through policy dictated by the masses, laws cease to exist. And then democracy devolves into a tyranny where there’s still all the self-indulgence of a democracy, but then there are no laws either. Society is in chaos. And then a tyrant eventually seizes power.

So, as I said at the beginning, a guy named Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all subsequent Western philosophy is merely footnotes to Plato and his work. Now, I think most people hear this, and they instantly think it’s an extreme exaggeration. But I think it comes down to how you interpret it. No, Plato didn’t think of every philosophical breakthrough that was to come back in the early third century BC. To even imply that he did would be dishonest. But maybe Alfred Whitehead was alluding to the fact that the questions of epistemology and metaphysics that Plato asked throughout the years were analyzed and considered by other philosophers who came up with their own questions and treatises based on them, and you could say even the philosophers of today are still trying to answer the questions that Plato initially brought up all those years ago.

So much of his work found relevance throughout the years. His entire body of work was put to use for Christianity by people like Plotinus and Saint Augustine. I mean, just the Allegory of the Cave alone acted as a perfect metaphor for being lost, in chains, forced to look around at an inferior world, and then finally managing to untie yourself and finding Jesus Christ, your personal Lord and Savior who shines the light of absolute truth upon you.

Speaking of which, philosophize this: what do you think about Plato’s idea of the world around us not being exactly as it seems? Have you ever had an experience that changed your perception of something so that you felt you were seeing it as it actually is for the first time?