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Lesson 2.1: Not of This World (Pt. I)
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Topics discussed:
- Common themes across Plato's body of work
- Plato as a solver of metaphysical puzzles
- Plato as a math fanatic
- Plato as mystic
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Transcript
The Polyphonic Nature of Plato's Philosophy
00:00:03
Speaker
Plato has many voices, not, as some people think, many doctrines. These are the words of Arius Didymus, and Arius is dealing with the same problem that we still wrestle with today. It's hard to know what Plato thought. This is the problem of interpreting Plato. It's not that the doctrines are unclear.
00:00:30
Speaker
Perhaps it's better to say that they're hidden and we must labor to bring them to light. And, well, just so you know some context, Arius Didymus was the court philosopher to the Emperor Augustus,
Plato's Teaching Style and Influence
00:00:47
Speaker
right? He was the the stoic tutor of Augustus, the emperor of Rome in the 1st century BCE.
00:00:55
Speaker
And he, just like us, students of philosophy 2,000 years later, were grappling with Plato. Plato is simply one of those philosophers who is, well, I'll go ahead and say it now, just an excellent teacher. He makes you think in one way for a time and then in another way for a time.
00:01:18
Speaker
and he makes you come up with your own solutions in a way. So I'm going to try my best to introduce you to this great philosopher, Plato.
00:01:33
Speaker
A philosopher who, by the way, some have said that all of Western philosophy are just mere footnotes to Plato, right? Plato laid it all out for us and we're just kind of writing footnotes to his basic worldview of philosophy. That, by the way, was Alfred North Whitehead, a very influential logician. So let's write some footnotes then, shall we?
00:02:05
Speaker
Plato, as many people know, wrote in dialogues.
Interpreting Plato's Dialogues
00:02:10
Speaker
He did not write out treatises where he would explain his views. He instead told stories. you know They are essentially plays where Socrates is almost always the main character, and Socrates, by the way, was Plato's teacher.
00:02:29
Speaker
And the dialogues are, well, typically they involve Socrates and one other main interlocutor is the word that is usually used, one other person that he is talking to. And they're usually, or at least often, are trying to define something. What is virtue? What is justice? These are the famous platonic dialogues.
00:02:55
Speaker
They are very meta once you really dive into them. And what I mean by that is that you could, of course, take it right at face value. Oh, he's trying to tell us justice is this. He's trying to tell us that the ideal city state is like this. But sometimes the dialogues describe one thing, right whatever thing you're talking about, in a way that is contradicted by the way it's being delivered. I'm not sure I got that across very clearly. Let me give you an example. In Republic, one of Plato's master works, or at least it's considered one of his master works, I guess not everyone agrees, but
00:03:44
Speaker
definitely a very influential dialogue. Plato argues that the true philosophy, what philosophy ideally should be, it should be mathematical and abstract. Okay, mathematical and abstract philosophy is a way to go. But he's giving this piece of doctrine to us in a dialogue, in essentially a play.
00:04:13
Speaker
and the Republic is a you know a very elaborate play. right so This is a weird way to say that philosophy should be mathematical. He's telling us it should be this way, but he's giving it to us in a way that contradicts what he's saying.
00:04:30
Speaker
right The Republic is full of analogies and metaphor and there's a myth that closes the entire book. And so maybe he doesn't really mean what he says, that it should be mathematical and abstract. Or maybe he does, but the way to begin to approach philosophy is through analogy and metaphor and myth. And then at the top level, you become mathematical and abstract. Which is it? Well,
00:04:56
Speaker
That's what Plato is so good at doing. He's good at getting us to think about what he said. He shows us that the ideas are worth thinking about, debating about, coming up with arguments about, reflecting on. And so that's why I say it's so meta. it there's just you know there's ah There's two sides of it always, at least two sides, I should say. I'll give you one more example.
00:05:24
Speaker
In the Republic, same book I was just speaking about, he says that we need to ban the poets from the ideal city-state.
00:05:38
Speaker
right, because they their influence is just pernicious. they're They're a bad influence, much like other philosophers. He thought that the poet's ideas about what the gods are like, they're wrong, and they're giving us a bad example. It shouldn't be the case that Zeus, for example, just, you know, does all kinds of awful things, and that's supposed to be the supreme God. So Plato, in his ideal state, gets rid of the poets.
00:06:05
Speaker
But he's telling us this in a piece of theater, again. In other words, his very book, Republic, would maybe not be allowed in his ideal state. So, you know, we get into one of these debates. well What does he really mean then?
Plato's Lasting Influence on Philosophy
00:06:23
Speaker
Okay, well, I think what is very clear to me, at least, is that you can't easily write off Plato. You can't just say, this is a contradiction, you know, this is...
00:06:34
Speaker
This is not worth thinking about. you know He just likes to talk a lot, whatever. ah That is definitely not how you want to treat Plato because the people that knew him personally saw something else. All we get are his dialogues, but he had a very magnetic quality, brilliant people. Some of the most brilliant from the Greek world would go to Athens to enroll in his school, the Academy. This includes people that you've heard of, right Aristotle, and they would stick around for decades, 20, 30 years of their lives. They just wanted to be around Plato.
00:07:16
Speaker
So it will take some effort to understand Plato, but I think it is way worth your time.
Debating Plato's Philosophical Consistency
00:07:25
Speaker
Needless to say, he was way smarter than I am, and he was the most famous philosopher of his day, an icon, really. There's something special here, except it's not really clear what it is, so or maybe that's what's special about him.
00:07:41
Speaker
okay Let me give you a couple of tidbits about the gentleman or about a research into Plato, and then we'll try to get into different ways of thinking about Plato. so When we are trying to interpret Plato, scholars have come up with two approaches to thinking about his views, and they are called developmentalism and Unitarianism.
00:08:11
Speaker
Now, I'm going to mention this only because this really showcases how challenging it has been to pin down Plato and how much time people have spent on this, right? So according to the developmental view,
00:08:28
Speaker
Plato gradually got to his views. At first, he was more like Socrates when he was Socrates' student. He thought the things that Socrates thought. And so if you look at the early dialogues that he wrote, that's really more Socrates and Plato. But by the time they get to the middle and late dialogues, that's more Plato than Socrates. And people who are developmentalists see a gradual shift in Plato's views.
00:08:58
Speaker
Other people are Unitarians. They actually say, no, you're not reading it right. You can actually see the very same views both in early dialogues and late dialogues. You just kind of have to squint at it in the right way and you will see that there's actually just one doctrine or one set of doctrines.
00:09:19
Speaker
And so that is how rich the debate is into you know what Plato really thought. We're not even sure if he changed his mind over time, which is, you know, that would be very natural, or if he had the same views all along. It's probably impossible to decide either way. I mean, I've read arguments on both sides and I have no idea which way to go.
00:09:45
Speaker
And we should also say that part of the reason for this is that the dialogues were, you know, they're kind of organic. It's not like they were done and he just, you know, all right, this dialogue is done, there it's published, I won't edit it anymore. um They were probably constantly being updated and there was newer versions of them.
00:10:06
Speaker
And it might be the case that sometimes a dialogue would be just kind of lumped in with another bunch of writings. For example, it seems like the very first book of the Republic, right his masterwork that I spoke of earlier, that was probably first an independent dialogue named Thrasymachus after one of the characters.
00:10:26
Speaker
And then he you know basically expanded it and out of that expansion came Republic the way we know it today. So it just seems to me that this kind of debate will won't be really fruitful or it will be impossible to definitively say either way. And the fact that scholars spend their lives trying to figure this out shows you how much content there is in Plato.
Plato's Rejection of Materialism and Nominalism
00:10:52
Speaker
Anyway, despite all this controversy as to whether or not he had the same views over time or different views evolved over time, there are pretty much universally agreed common themes throughout his works. So even if on some ideas he changes his mind over time,
00:11:13
Speaker
The ones that I'm going to mention right now, they seem to keep cropping up no matter what. And so maybe there's a fixed number of views that, you know, kind of remain the same.
00:11:26
Speaker
and Let's take a look at those now because that will help you understand Plato in general. so Let's talk about what he rejected first of all. He definitely seems to have rejected the following. Materialism, nominalism, relativism, and skepticism. What are these things? Let's start with materialism.
00:11:51
Speaker
Materialism, at least in the time period in question, is the view that the only things that exist are things that occupy space, things whose existence depends on these things that occupy space, and the void.
00:12:08
Speaker
All right, so maybe I'll make this a lot easier for you by saying materialism is very closely associated with a philosopher named Democritus. And Democritus was very famous for positing that there are indivisible little substances. He called them atoms. And out of these atoms, compounds were made.
00:12:32
Speaker
And all that the world is, is compounds made out of atoms. Now, these compounds are temporary. They will eventually, you know, degenerate and go back to just atoms. And all that life is, is just atoms interacting with each other, and making compounds in the empty space, which he called the void. So just atoms and void, that's all everything is.
00:12:59
Speaker
key to you know understanding Plato is that materialism implies, at least in the kind of materialism that Democritus was thinking of, that souls are just physical things. Nowadays, we don't call souls just physical things. We call them maybe a brain or a mind. Actually, that's a better way to put it. But in the ancient world,
00:13:25
Speaker
the mind and the soul, it's basically the same thing, right? So there's just a difference. Some people think souls are non-physical. Maybe today, if you are a Christian, you believe that your soul will survive your bodily death, right? you know It'll go to heaven or hell. Hopefully heaven, obviously. In the ancient world, though, you could say soul and mean it to be a pure physical thing, right? They they just meant mind by that word. And so, according to Democritus,
00:13:54
Speaker
Our soul slash mind is just a physical thing and it's eventually going to perish. When you die, your mind dies and that's it. Plato did not like this idea. The view that is associated with Plato is called substance dualism.
00:14:13
Speaker
That's the view that souls or minds are wholly non-physical, right? They are a different kind of substance. There's two kinds of substances. There's material things and immaterial souls. And so, you know, it's not that our soul slash mind is just a bunch of atoms. Our soul slash mind is its own independent thing. It can survive our bodily death. And according to Plato,
00:14:42
Speaker
Well, we will actually be reincarnated. We'll get into that in a little bit, but Plato does believe in reincarnation. And of course, the only way you can really believe in that is if you believe that something about you, something not physical, right? Like your soul survives when your body dies and it has to get put into a new body eventually, right? So we'll talk about that in a little bit, but that is what Plato's rejection of materialism amounts to.
00:15:13
Speaker
One place where we can see this rejection of materialism very clearly is in what is typically called the argument from recollection. so Plato believes that we know certain things, and I'll talk about what those things are in a bit, but we know them because we used to exist as souls.
00:15:34
Speaker
in some other realm, and then we were born, and so we remember those things that we saw and experienced prior to having been born. So that is called the argument from recollection. I will flesh that out a little bit later. Needless to say, it's pretty clear that souls, non-physical souls, I should be specific, are very important to Plato's overall philosophy.
00:16:02
Speaker
Plato also rejected nominalism. Nominalism is the view that universals don't exist. They're just labels we put on collections of objects. Okay, so you might be wondering then what the heck are universals? Let me explain it this way. um I just saw a chameleon on TV. I was watching one of these nature shows. I like nature shows. What do all chameleons have in common?
00:16:31
Speaker
Well, you might say a couple of things, right? You know, four limbs and a tail and a long sticky tongue. But beyond that, isn't there a fundamental nature that they all have? Some kind of chameleon-ness? Well, that's what Plato thinks, right? There's a chameleon-ness. And anything that has this chameleon-ness is a chameleon.
00:16:56
Speaker
And even if you were to do all the things that chameleons do and you were to have surgery to get a long sticky tongue, you wouldn't be a chameleon because you lack this chameleonness, chameleonhood, maybe you want to call it. Another example, what do all chairs have in common? Well, they're not all made out of wood. They're not all made out of metal. They're not all comfortable. I've been in some pretty uncomfortable chairs.
00:17:25
Speaker
What do they all have in common? Well, chairhood, right? Some kind of chairness. And what do all blue objects have in common? Well, nothing other than they're blue. But the way Plato would say it is that they all share in blueness. Blueness can be seen in all of them. And so for Plato, there are these things, these these are called universals.
00:17:54
Speaker
chameleonness, chairhood, blueness, all of these are the universals that our everyday objects are based on. You know, if I were to have a pet chameleon,
00:18:07
Speaker
The template for that pet chameleon is this chameleon-ness that exists, according to Plato, independent of all of us. There is just this thing called chameleon-ness, and all chameleons participate in this idea. So the idea of a template is maybe you know useful here. Plato believes there are templates for every single kind of animal.
00:18:31
Speaker
and, you know, every single color, all mathematical objects too, right? If you were to write the number seven on your piece of paper here, well, that's not like the number seven. That's just, you know, a pile of ink. And what is the real number seven? Well, Plato might say that it's it's special, right? it's It's different. It exists independently of any of our writings or our ideas. So that's getting close to what universals are.
00:19:02
Speaker
Now the debate between nominalism and universalism basically comes down to this. Do these templates exist independent of our minds? Or are they just ideas that we came up with because we you know i know looked at a bunch of chameleons and chairs and blue things?
00:19:22
Speaker
Well, the nominalist says it's the second. It's just a bunch of labels for categories that humans invented when we looked at a bunch of chameleons and chairs and blue things.
00:19:34
Speaker
But Plato believes that chameleonness and chairhood and blueness, these things are real, these templates are real. He calls them forms and they exist independent of human minds, independent of the physical world. In fact, this view is so associated with Plato that it's actually called, usually, Platonism.
Education, Ethics, and the Philosopher-King
00:20:04
Speaker
Plato also rejected relativism. So relativism can mean a couple of different things. There's actually many flavors of relativism that there's no way I can get into right now. But the basic idea is that some things are only capable of being assessed in a relation to some framework.
00:20:28
Speaker
And so um a very infamous view is something like truth is relative, right? So there's true for you, there's true for me, there's true for them, true for us. That would be a relative view. Different groups can have their own truth. That is relativism par excellence, right? That's some hardcore relativism right there. um Well, Plato did not like relativism at all. And he gives what is sometimes called the argument from self-reference. I sometimes call this the problem of self-defeat. But think about it this way. If relativism is true, then it could be said that relativism is only true for, say, I don't know, Protagoras or Heraclitus.
00:21:17
Speaker
In other words, relativism cannot be said to be a universally valid doctrine since it being true would render it incapable of being universally valid. In other words, let's just say that you're a relativist and you come up to me and you're like, hey, by the way, everything's relative. Truth is relative.
00:21:35
Speaker
And I say, okay, cool. Well, that's not true for me. Maybe it's true for you. How would you respond as a relativist? You literally can't. You would just say, oh, like I guess that's right because relativism is itself a claim to truth and it could be true for me and false for you. And so that's how relativism is self-defeating according to Plato.
00:22:02
Speaker
By the way, that argument comes from one of his dialogues, Theatetus. In any case, clearly Plato is not a fan of some of the relativism of the sophists, like Protagoras.
00:22:17
Speaker
And finally, one other thing that Plato rejects pretty forcefully is skepticism. So two strands of Plato's thought unite to combat skepticism. Two different, you know, recurring themes in his works. One of these strands is Plato's fondness for utopian thinking.
00:22:41
Speaker
Repeatedly, Plato tries to imagine what the perfect city-state would be like. So that's him being a utopian. And the other recurring theme is his love of mathematics. Now, when you put these two things together, you can see that he really stands against skepticism. So in dialogues like Republic, which I've already mentioned, but also laws,
00:23:05
Speaker
Plato seems to claim that if we structure society in the right way and we put young people right from the start through an excellent educational system and have a rigorous selection process so that the best move on and on to more and more study, and we put them on the perfect program of study, right? Lots of mathematics, but everything else that they might need. What comes out at the other end are individuals who understand reality at a fundamental level. That's what Plato thought. And so that's basically the opposite of skepticism. The only reason why we have uncertainty now, Plato might say, is because we haven't structured society in the right way. We haven't made educating the children you know the main priority.
00:23:58
Speaker
and we don't have the right curriculum. But once we put those things in place, then we can have true knowledge. I should mention two other quick things on this thought. One of them is that he probably got some of these ideas from a buddy of his who was a Pythagorean, that is, a member of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, the ah group that was initiated by Pythagoras.
00:24:25
Speaker
And this is Architas, so he probably got some of these ideas from Architas. If you read Architas, he says something like this. ah It at least rhymes, right? It's not exactly like this, but maybe he thought about it some more. The second thing I should mention is that Plato definitely thinks that in an ideal state,
00:24:47
Speaker
At least one of the top priorities ought to be the proper education of children. And this might also be a Pythagorean idea. Pythagoras is said to have said something like, if you educate the boy, you won't have to punish the man. In other words, if you raise children well, there will be no need for punishment as adults. They will just do the right things naturally.
00:25:18
Speaker
Well, those are the things that Plato rejects by and large. And I think most scholars agree that those are fairly characteristic of Plato. There's just two other recurring ideas that I want to touch on very quickly. And one of them comes from his teacher Socrates. So Plato definitely held that humans ought to develop what I might call self-mastery, right?
00:25:47
Speaker
We have to reach an orderly state of the soul where reason dominates the passions right and the appetites. so Plato believed that the soul has three parts, and one of them is reason. And there's also you know the emotions, the passions, and the appetites. These are our you know kind of base drives, need for sex and power and that kind of stuff. And so ideally, you want your reasoning part to dominate the other two. And once you get there, that would be called self-mastery, self-control.
00:26:29
Speaker
Beyond that, he actually thinks that state of self-mastery is becoming closer to God. now For Plato, God is not exactly what the Christian thinks a God is, or any other modern religion for that matter. and We'll talk about Plato's views on God later.
00:26:48
Speaker
But Plato definitely saw acquiring self-control as necessary to not only be happy, but to be like God. That is what the goal of life is. That is, in other words, thriving and flourishing, eudaimonia. The other recurring idea that I'll mention is sort of more of an observation, actually.
00:27:12
Speaker
um Plato saw ethics as intertwined with metaphysics and epistemology. right so He thought we could gain access to you know the metaphysical realm, to how reality really is, and have knowledge about it. That's where the epistemology comes in.
00:27:35
Speaker
but only if we live the right way. That's the ethics part of it, right? So we have to make sure that the rational part of the soul dominates the passions and the appetites, and of course go through the proper course of study. And then only with that combination will we get the appropriate metaphysical knowledge.
00:27:57
Speaker
So instead of doing ethics as separate from metaphysics as separate from epistemology, he saw all of them as you know part of the same endeavor. And by the way, I'll drop a hint right now.
00:28:11
Speaker
those that are able to pull this off, those that can achieve this state of knowledge, well, they won't know the fundamental reality of the cosmos of the universe, right? And thus, they will be best able to govern and design society. And when they do run society, well, everyone will be happy.
00:28:36
Speaker
And so Plato is going to suggest that only those with knowledge of the forms can be rulers. This is the idea of a philosopher-king. We'll get back to this in a little bit, but there are some recurring ideas from Plato.
00:28:58
Speaker
So to recap, Plato rejected materialism, nominalism, relativism, and skepticism And He believed that you should achieve self-control because only by perfecting the soul can we reach a deeper level of understanding, knowledge of the fundamental structure of the world.
Exploring Interpretations of Plato
00:29:52
Speaker
So now that we have a little bit of background on Plato, some of his recurring ideas and maybe what might be called his doctrines, from here, there's actually considerable latitude as to how it is that we want to interpret Plato.
00:30:10
Speaker
That's why what I want to do today and the rest of this lesson is rather than give you some definitive interpretation, I'm going to give you six ways to look at Plato. Now, you can find various scholars who advocate one or another of these versions, these ways to look at Plato.
00:30:31
Speaker
I'm not really being true to any one of them. I just want to give you the flavor of each of them. If you want specifics, you know, you'd have to dig a little deeper. But here are a couple of ways to to think about the the man and the myth, Plato. Here's the first way to look at him.
00:30:48
Speaker
He is simply a solver of metaphysical puzzles. If we want to look at Plato through this lens, we have to remember that he was the student of Socrates, and one of Socrates' is main goals, it seems, was to get real definitions of moral terms. That's sort of what's unique and distinctive about Socrates.
00:31:13
Speaker
He wasn't the first one to you know popularize argumentation or or any of that kind of stuff. that That might have been the sophists, actually, these traveling teachers.
00:31:25
Speaker
that you know would essentially charge you to teach them how to argue both sides of an argument. If Socrates was unique in anything, it might have been his focus on the definition of moral terms. What is piety? What is virtue? Can we teach virtue? What is justice?
00:31:45
Speaker
Given that Plato was a student of Socrates, maybe we can see Plato as wanting to complete this quest for the real definition of mortal terms.
00:31:58
Speaker
But, of course, Plato was his own man, so it seems like not only was he interested in the definition of moral terms, but also things like beauty and mathematics. He wondered why it was the case that sentences like 2 plus 2 equals 4 are always true.
00:32:18
Speaker
We know that's true, but what makes it true? Here's another one. Persephone is beautiful, right? Why is that sentence true? It must be the case that it's not merely opinion. There must be something deeper in there that makes that statement true.
00:32:38
Speaker
And so we have it on good authority that Plato came up with a distinctive way to answer this question when you're wondering what is the real definition of moral terms or of aesthetic claims like Persephone is beautiful or of mathematical propositions like 2 plus 2 equals 4. What is it that makes them true?
00:33:02
Speaker
According to Aristotle, Plato saw the ultimate truth maker of these terms as being something non-physical.
Understanding Plato's Theory of Forms
00:33:14
Speaker
In other words, let's just take beauty. Beauty, right? The real beauty, the thing that all beautiful things have in common. That must be a non-perceptible thing, a non-physical thing, an eternal thing. Real beauty must exist independent of this world, independent of human minds. It just exists in its own way in some other realm.
00:33:43
Speaker
Why does it have to be like this? Well... It can't be the physical realm, right? The beauty itself can't be physical because the physical realm is, you know, liable to decay. I know this very well as I get older, my shoulder just gets worse and worse, right? So the physical realm, everything in this realm eventually falls apart, whether it be our bodies or houses. You need to, you know, tear some houses down every once in a while, reconstruct them.
00:34:15
Speaker
Nothing lasts forever. Even if it lasts thousands of years, we know that the Great Pyramids will eventually fall apart. right So that's the nature of the physical realm. But beauty, the way that Plato thinks about it, whatever it is, right beauty will always exist and different physical things will be beautiful. But beauty itself will persist even when all beautiful things come and go.
00:34:42
Speaker
Maybe another way to put this is that a sentence like Persephone is beautiful. That sentence is true now. It was true in Plato's day and it will be true, you know, for your great, great, great, great grandchildren.
00:34:58
Speaker
That sentence is always true, will forever be true. What makes it true? It must be the case that beauty itself lasts eternally, right? It has no beginning, it has no end. That's what always makes that sentence true.
00:35:15
Speaker
Another important aspect of this way of looking at the real definition of beauty, of thinking of it as ah an eternal form that exists in some other realm, is that you can be wrong, right? and I mean, this is ah against relativism. We've already seen that Plato rejects relativism. So here is one way to reject relativism by saying, look,
00:35:37
Speaker
There is an objective form of beauty. It exists independent of human minds. So some people might be confused. They might be, for whatever depraved reason, see some things as beautiful when they're really actually not objectively beautiful. So Plato believes in objective beauty.
00:35:57
Speaker
This is very counter to what some relativists might say where beauty is in the eye of the holder. No, no, no, no, no. Plato might say something like, if you don't think Beethoven's fifth is an amazing symphony, just absolutely masterful, then you're wrong. So he might be, you know obviously he never heard Beethoven, but he might think something like that.
00:36:22
Speaker
And so it's not only beauty that exists independently of human minds, but also whatever I mentioned earlier, right? Chairhood, chameleonness, blueness, beauty, mathematical objects, like numbers and functions, all of these exist eternally in some other realm. By the way, this other realm or dimension, we sometimes refer to this as platonic heaven, right? Plato's heaven.
00:36:51
Speaker
in this other dimension, the perfect forms of everything that we see in this world exist. So here in this world, we see rabbits and tables and good deeds, but in the Platonic realm, in Platonic heaven,
00:37:07
Speaker
That's where you see rabbithood and tablehood and goodness itself. Sometimes Plato calls this the good, right? It's not just a good deed, it's the good, that which all good deeds have in common. Now, some people instinctively dislike this idea. In fact, the reason why Aristotle discusses this idea is because he disagrees with it.
00:37:32
Speaker
Aristotle is not alone in rejecting the doctrine of the forms. Diogenes the dog, who was a cynic philosopher, who was a homeless man that lived either in a clay jar or a barrel. He also rejected the theory of the forms. And in true cynic fashion, he basically just ridiculed it, right? He would say, I could see tables, but I can't see table nests. I can see cups, but I can't see cup hood, you know, things like that. That's more of the cynic style.
00:38:08
Speaker
It's kind of an anti-philosophy, you know? And Plato would respond to him. He would say, well, you know, you have eyes to see tables and cups. You just don't yet have the mind to see tablehood and cuphood.
00:38:22
Speaker
right So, Plato believes that you need to labor intellectually to train the mind, to discipline the soul and improve its state so that you can truly understand the fundamental nature of reality. right Once you do this training, that's when you can see tablehood and kaput and understand that at heart, everything is based on the forms.
00:38:48
Speaker
Another metaphysical puzzle that Plato wanted to solve is this debate between being and becoming. So this debate goes back to the Milesian philosophers. The Milesian philosophers, each of them said that some particular element or arche, some primal substance, that's the root of everything else.
00:39:13
Speaker
For example, Thales said that water is the first principle from which everything else comes. right So water is being with a capital B, water will always persist and it's eternal, and everything that exists is in some way dependent on water.
00:39:32
Speaker
And so everything that exists is becoming, right? It's in the stage of coming into being and then eventually falling apart or ceasing to exist. And so the world that we see, that's the realm of becoming. Everything's always in flux. Things come into existence. They go out of existence.
Recollection and the Pursuit of Forms
00:39:50
Speaker
People are born. People die. But the only thing that stays the same, that stays permanent is that which is being, which is water in his case.
00:40:01
Speaker
Well, we also had some people in the history of philosophy, like Heraclitus and Parmenides, who basically took just one side of this. So Heraclitus just said, well, everything is becoming everything is in a state of flux. Nothing is permanent. If you think it's permanent, it's actually only your way of looking at things. But you're wrong. If you really think about it, everything is in flux, perpetually.
00:40:30
Speaker
That's Heraclitus. Parmenides, on the other hand, said, actually, it's all being with a capital B. You think that there's change, you think that there's movement, but all of that is simply an illusion. That's where Parmenides student, Zeno, tries to give you examples as to why it is that, you know, change is impossible. And there's a famous one with Achilles and the tortoise. In any case, these are just philosophers wrestling with this you know, tension between being and becoming. How is it that the world of becoming comes out of being? Or is it the case that there's only being? Or is it the case that there's only becoming? Well, Plato comes into this mix and it turns out that he had both a teacher that was a follower of Heraclitus and a teacher that was a follower of Parmenides.
00:41:25
Speaker
And what he did was he found a way to fuse the two views. So we can see this with his theory of the forms. The forms, that's the realm of being. Those are eternal. And everything that we see in our world, the world of becoming, the physical realm that we inhabit, that is all based on this world of being. And so he figured out how to fuse these two.
00:41:53
Speaker
There's a world of being, right? The incorporeal, the non-physical, eternal, unchanging, you know, forms in Platonic heaven. And then there's the world that we live in, the world of becoming. Everything's always in flux. So they both exist, but it's not one thing, like Thales said, it's not just water. There's a form for, well, there's a form for everything that needs to have a form. That's the way I'm going to put it now.
00:42:21
Speaker
I'll say that because there's disagreement as to how many forms there really are. In any case, that's to yet another metaphysical puzzle that Plato tried to solve. And as he's explaining his solutions to these metaphysical puzzles, new puzzles arose. For example,
00:42:43
Speaker
If everything that we see in this physical realm that we are a part of is actually based on the forms which exist in some other realm, how do we know the forms? right The only way we can learn things, it seems, is by experiencing them. You learn by seeing, by touching, by hearing. But if the forms exist in some other realm and they're not physical, that means you can't see them and they don't make sounds.
00:43:12
Speaker
You can't touch them. So, how do we know about them? Well, in different dialogues, he provides his explanation, his theory for how it is that we know the forms. Essentially, we knew them all along.
00:43:29
Speaker
right so He has a couple of different theories. Let's start with the argument from recollection. So according to this view, which comes from a few dialogues, we see this in Fido and Mino. These are two dialogues that are very important for Plato's metaphysical doctrines. We see that We actually lived in Platonic heaven before we were born. In other words, before we were born, we existed in the same realm as the form of the good. And what else did I speak of? Tableness and cuphood, blueness. We existed alongside these forms. And when we were born, we simply forgot about the forms. But we already knew them.
00:44:21
Speaker
And all we need to do is through the right training, through the right philosophical curriculum, we can come to remember the forms. In other words, we can come to recollect what we knew before we were born. That's why it's called the argument from recollection. And so that's one way that we can come to know the forms we simply have to remember.
00:44:50
Speaker
There are other ways to come to know the forms in another dialogue, a symposium. Plato makes the case that we might know the forms through one form in particular, through beauty. Beauty is the form that is, let's just say, the most tangible.
00:45:10
Speaker
in the terrestrial realm. In other words, here when we are in our regular worldly existence, we see beautiful things and we are struck by them, right? If it's something that's truly magnificent, you know, you forget your name and you are in awe.
00:45:28
Speaker
That's the kind of feeling that you get when you come to know the forms in general. So it is through looking at beautiful things that you come to know the form of beauty, right? Beauty itself, the form of beauty. And by knowing the form of beauty, you can slowly come to know the other forms. Ultimately, working your way all the way up to the form of the good. The good, by the way, in Plato's hierarchy of forms is at the very tip top.
Mathematics as a Paradigm of Understanding
00:45:59
Speaker
And so there you have it. If you want to come to know the forms, go look at some beautiful art, listen to some beautiful music, go take in some natural beauty, some mountains, some rivers, and you'll come to know the forms.
00:46:27
Speaker
Here is a second way to look at Plato. Plato was simply a math fanatic. The entry point to see Plato through this lens probably includes the developmental view. As I mentioned earlier, according to this view, Plato gradually abandoned the views of Socrates,
00:46:53
Speaker
and developed his own philosophy. And so what we see in this particular case is that rather than using the Socratic alencus, which is this method of question and answer that ultimately gets you to get rid of your false beliefs to show you that some of your beliefs are false, and hopefully through trial and error gets you to some correct beliefs, that's the alencus.
00:47:21
Speaker
Plato eventually gives up this method and instead he switches it for some kind of more mathematical approach. So in some of the dialogues, we see that he thinks geometric knowledge serve as sort of a paradigm for all knowledge. In other words, just like in geometry,
00:47:44
Speaker
We can begin with things that we know with certainty. Let's call these axioms, things that are maybe self-evident. And based on these things, build upon them and develop a strong foundation for the rest of our knowledge.
00:48:03
Speaker
This idea that we can come to gain complete knowledge through reason is known as rationalism in philosophy. Now be careful, there's many different definitions of the word rationalism, so this is one kind of philosophical rationalism. But basically, according to rationalists, all knowledge ultimately rests upon reason itself, things we know from reason alone.
00:48:31
Speaker
And so through of these axioms, Plato believed that he can develop an entire philosophical system. Maybe the best way to really understand Plato as a math fanatic is to look at what is referred to as the divided line analogy. So essentially, in one of the dialogues,
00:48:56
Speaker
Plato draws some lines on the ground, and he says these kind of relate to the way that reality is structured. There's actually multiple interpretations of this. I'm going to use the one by Stuart Shapiro in his book, Thinking About Mathematics.
00:49:15
Speaker
And when we look at it through Shapiro's eyes, there's basically five sections. And I'm going to tell you about those now. The bottom two sections are, let's start from the bottom, it's reflections. And then right above that, it's physical objects. So what you want to think of here is you and a mirror. Now, this is a weird way to phrase it, but this is close to what Plato meant.
00:49:45
Speaker
you are realer than your reflection. Clearly, your reflection is contingent upon you. As a matter of fact, we know this because if you move away from the mirror, your reflection is gone, but you're still around, you're just somewhere else. So another way to put this then is that physical objects are the substance on which reflections are based.
00:50:13
Speaker
Okay, well now let's go to the top of the hierarchy, the top of the five tier structure. Here we have at the very tip top, the good, the form of the good. And right beneath the good are all the other forms, table hood, cup hood, chameleonness, blueness, whatever.
00:50:40
Speaker
The physical realm depends on the forms, the way that your reflection depends on you standing in front of the mirror. In other words, the forms are the substance on which physical objects are based. So what's realer, the forms or the physical objects? Well, just like you are realer than your reflection,
00:51:08
Speaker
The forms are realer than the physical objects of this world. And just to reiterate something I mentioned earlier, the good sits on top of all the rest of the forms. So the good structures the hierarchy, right? It's at the very tip top. So it is the organizing power of the forms.
00:51:32
Speaker
All right, so I mentioned the bottom two and I discussed the top two and I discussed the relationship, but I mentioned that there's five different tiers. Well, right smack in the middle.
00:51:44
Speaker
are mathematical objects. These, according to Plato or Platonist philosophers, are numbers. They are geometric forms, circularity, squareness. They're all in this realm. They're all in this tier. Functions, right? Plus one, that's over here. Equality, all these mathematical ideas exist in this particular tier.
00:52:10
Speaker
and they are right between the forms and physical objects. In other words, they're between the world of being and our world, the world of becoming. And so we can see that according to Plato, since we live in the physical realm,
00:52:34
Speaker
If we want to understand the realm of the forms, we must go through the mathematical realm. In other words, mathematics is the key to understanding the fundamental nature of reality. It is through mathematical knowledge that we can approach true knowledge. Let's notice something about this.
00:53:01
Speaker
If you are a physicist or an economist or a mathematically minded psychologist or so sociologist, you believe the same thing. You believe that mathematical tools help you understand reality as it really is. In a way,
00:53:22
Speaker
This is what your math teachers have been telling you all along. If you have a facility with numbers, if you are numerically literate, you will do better in life. You will understand things in a richer, more robust way.
00:53:38
Speaker
Now, the only place where your math teacher and Plato might differ is that Plato believes you can gain a complete knowledge of reality. It is possible to do this, but we have to endeavor basically from one more children to attempt to grasp the forms. So as we can see, Plato has a lot of faith in mathematics. Given this, it's not surprising that at the Academy,
00:54:09
Speaker
which is Plato's school, mathematics was a central part of the curriculum. And for that reason, they were actually quite good at it. Several sources suggest that the Academy was a center of mathematical research. I mean, they were making progress on things like systematizing the field.
00:54:30
Speaker
And that was probably a goal that Plato himself encouraged. So there is a fascinating um line of evidence that suggests maybe that Euclid was actually in some way related to the Academy. Now, if you don't know who Euclid is, he wrote a book called Elements of Geometry. and This is basically a textbook that was used forever. It was one of the most important, continuously used mathematics textbooks in history.
00:55:07
Speaker
Not only that, it was sort of like a monumental work of rigorous mathematical deduction. What Euclid did was begin with some axioms and basically figured out what else he knew based on these axioms. And he built geometry, you know, the way they teach it to you in high school. So that guy, Euclid, might have had some ties to Plato's Academy.
00:55:35
Speaker
So if this theory is true, we can see that Plato's Academy was the center of mathematical research in the Greek world, right not just Athens, but the Greek world in general.
Plato's Mysticism and Metaphysical Beliefs
00:55:48
Speaker
Interestingly, though, it doesn't seem like Plato himself taught mathematics.
00:55:54
Speaker
We know that he was up to date on all the major fields because you can see it in his dialogues. In his dialogues, I guess you only know this if you have a background in math, but when you read them, he mentions a couple of big ideas of the time. I'll mention some of them. The problem of incommensurability, the theory of proportions, plane and solid geometry.
00:56:17
Speaker
Arithmetic, astronomy, optics. So these are all found in his dialogues, but he didn't seem to teach any of these subjects. It seems like, if anything, he served as this kind of a vague word here, but kind of an architect for the mathematical projects that were conducted in the Academy. In other words, he oversaw the work of the mathematicians of the Academy.
00:56:44
Speaker
This goes to show you that Plato took math extremely seriously, right? Not only did he have a lot of faith in it, but he seems to have spent a lot of time on the subject making sure that there's progress.
00:57:13
Speaker
Here is a third way to see Plato. As a conservative reactionary, what do I mean by conservative reactionary? Well, it seems that there were new ideas going around in Greece, ideas like reductionism and relativism and skepticism and pushback against traditional religion.
00:57:43
Speaker
And it looks like he didn't like any of these. We've already spoken about relativism and skepticism. Let me talk a little bit about reductionism and traditional religion. Reductionism is basically a style of explanation. It's an attempt to reduce the explanatory components of a theory down to you know maybe just a couple of things, a few things.
00:58:12
Speaker
My regular example of this is a teacher that I had in my undergraduate studies who said that everything could be explained by just four forces. Strong and weak nuclear forces, that those are the first two. Gravity, number three, and electromagnetism, number four. Those four things, he said, could explain everything. We don't need any other ideas to explain a thing.
00:58:40
Speaker
Well, that is very, very reductionistic. Of course, my teacher was not around 2000 years ago, and so the reductionists that were around prior to Plato's day were the Milesians. Now, one Milesian that I already mentioned in this lesson is Thales, and he tried to explain everything through just one thing, water.
00:59:04
Speaker
Well, Plato seems to have not liked this sort of approach to explaining reality. And we can see this once again in his theory of forms. Remember, there are many, many forms. It isn't just, you know, four forces. And so rather than reducing the number of explanatory variables, he seems to be increasing it.
00:59:29
Speaker
Not only that, but the Milesians seemed to have wanted to keep their explanations natural. What that means is that the only kinds of explanations that counted are the ones that, in some sense, were observable, right? When Thales talked about water, there was a way to test his view, sort of.
00:59:52
Speaker
Whenever there is a living thing, there is some kind of water present, right? When a woman is pregnant, there are many, many liquids involved in that process. When the baby is born, you need water to keep it alive. So it seems like water is in some way central to not only human life, but all life. And so Thales was keeping his explanations naturalistic. That's the adjective form of the word.
01:00:22
Speaker
Well, Play-Doh pushed back on this too. Remember, the forms are not physical. And so there is no experiment. There is no physical observation that you can engage in to study the forms. Only the philosophical life with lots of mathematics can ever even grant you, hopefully, the opportunity to understand the forms. So in other words, you had to have a whole lifestyle to maybe grasp the forms.
01:00:58
Speaker
This is more you know religious. This is more traditional. And so maybe Plato can be seen as just pushing back on some of these ideas that were becoming increasingly prevalent in the Athens of his day. You can hear him pretty loudly proclaiming that not everything can be understood through observation and not every explanation has to be in terms of natural phenomena.
01:01:25
Speaker
Some things, Plato argues, are beyond the senses. They're beyond nature, even. Speaking of beyond nature, here is a fourth way to think of Plato. Plato was a mystic.
01:01:44
Speaker
In fact, the classicist Robin Waterfield puts Plato on a lineage of an evolving sort of monotheism. So there is a Greek kind of monotheism, and it is very much unlike Semitic monotheism, which is probably the kind of monotheism that you are more familiar with. Semitic monotheism begins with Judaism, and it continues with Christianity and Islam,
01:02:12
Speaker
So according to Semitic monotheism, God is an agent. right Think of it as like a person with a will. It wants some things. It doesn't want other things. And God is not a part of the world. God made the world. right So there are two separate things, God and the world. And third,
01:02:35
Speaker
God can act upon the world. Maybe He'll put certain people in certain places so that they can do certain things. right So He's always you know intervening in the world if He wants to, I guess. He can create miracles here and there. The label for this, by the way, is called Providence, Divine Providence, and that's Semitic monotheism.
01:02:59
Speaker
But Greek monotheism, well, they also believe in one God, but it's not exactly like the Semitic version. According to Greek monotheism, God is a part of nature. Maybe even God is nature. And the way that the Greeks conceive of it, especially a little bit after Plato, is that the laws of nature, the regularity that we see in nature, those are actually the thoughts of God.
01:03:29
Speaker
The regularity of nature is very rational according to some of these later theorists. And that's because the mind of God is rational. And so we can see an early conception of the laws of nature as being the thoughts of God.
01:03:46
Speaker
Because God is nature itself, it doesn't really have a will or desires. It's more like a force. you know If you want to think about Star Wars, that's okay. But even in Star Wars, there's sort of a direction that you know the force is going. But for the Greeks, God is more like the power that sustains the universe.
01:04:10
Speaker
There's no really you know inclination this way or that. It's more like a causal force with no feelings, no desires. Lastly, God does not act upon the world according to the Greeks, according to this kind of Greek monotheism.
01:04:31
Speaker
Why would God act upon the world? God is not a person. It has no will or desires. It just is. So the labels for these ideas are that God is imminent. He is a part of nature. God is non-agentive, right? He's not an agent. He's not a person. It's a force. Lastly, God does not act upon the world. There is no divine providence, right? So The laws of nature maybe are the thoughts of God, but it doesn't go beyond that. No miracles, that kind of thing. And that would be a denial of divine providence.
01:05:10
Speaker
Where does Plato lie in all of this? Well, he's somewhere in the middle. Basically, the view that I just described, this full-blown Greek monotheism, that won't really come about until maybe the Stoics. That's a good demarcation point for when that idea fully evolved. But it starts maybe with Xenophanes, right? It goes back a couple of generations to Xenophanes, who wasn't exactly a monotheist, but he seems to have believed that there is one God that is better than all the other ones and is all good.
01:05:44
Speaker
and you know he's like a sphere. So in between Xenophanes and the Stoics, you might find Plato maybe a little closer to the Stoics, Plato is. In any case, it seems like Plato clearly believed that there's a religious function to philosophy.
01:06:02
Speaker
ah It allows us to purify ourselves. and He actually thinks that this makes us more godly. We can gain divine understanding and knowledge, write the forms.
01:06:14
Speaker
And on top of that, there is actually a divine aspect to humans. Remember, we used to live with the forms in Platonic heaven. So we can endeavor to recollect this information. We can attain wisdom and become more godly. That's exactly what his utopian societies were for, to structure society so that more people can get to this state, too so that everyone can be happy.
01:06:42
Speaker
And that's also why he focused so much on the proper curriculum for children, so that they can learn the right things, so that once and again, they can flourish, they can purify themselves, they can become more like God. Now, when I say become more like God, don't slip into thinking in the way that the Semitic monotheist thinkers do, right? It's not like God in the Christian sense.
01:07:06
Speaker
It's like God in the Greek sense, where God is the rational organizing principle of the universe, right? So to become more like God means to be governed by reason. You have reason in charge of your emotions and your passions and your desires and all that. So whenever I say becoming more like God, just think of someone that is completely rational and has their emotions completely in check.
01:07:36
Speaker
That's what Plato means by that. Some other signs that Plato is a mystic in his master work Republic. Plato inserts a little myth right at the end of the book, the myth of Ur.
01:07:51
Speaker
And in this myth, he explains how there is punishment or reward depending on your behavior during your lifetime. And that happens, by the way, between reincarnations. So don't forget, Plato believes in reincarnation. This seems to be an early form of heaven.
01:08:11
Speaker
Now, this might be controversial to mention without a full explanation, but in the Judaism of this time, the idea of heaven wasn't really there. Even today, it's not really there. And there is no Christianity yet. We're talking about the 4th century BCE. And so this might be the first kind of move towards what would eventually become the heaven of Christianity. This idea might have been born with Plato. In any case, according to Plato, if you behave well, you get a reward in between this life and your next reincarnation. So you spend some time in between having to be born in the physical realm, and it's nice and enjoyable. If you are bad, well, you get punished during this time period.
01:09:00
Speaker
That's not the only place where Plato mentions reincarnation in two other dialogues, including one called The Laws. Plato kind of changes his tune a little bit about reincarnation. He says you don't get punished in between reincarnations, but rather that the next life you live will be either the reward or the punishment, whatever it is that you deserve.
01:09:22
Speaker
So if you lived a bad life, you will get punished in the next life, your next reincarnation, come back as a slug or something, I don't know. And if you lived a good life, you come back, you know, improved, more virtuous, more godly.
01:09:37
Speaker
By the way, we also get get more information from another dialogue, the Fido, that if we successfully live as philosophers for three consecutive lives, then we don't have to reincarnate again as humans, right? So there it is. There's a way out of the cycle of reincarnation. That might sound familiar to you if you know anything anything about Buddhism and Hinduism. Plato arrives at a similar view way over in Greece.
01:10:08
Speaker
more signs that Plato is a mystic. He sees the material world as inferior and always to you know the ideal realm, the divine realm. So this physical world is bad and the place beyond heaven, that's where the good is.
01:10:28
Speaker
Also, just like another mystic, Empedocles, by the way, Empedocles threw himself into a volcano because he wanted to confirm theories that he had become a god, so Empedocles clearly was a mystic. Well, Plato and Empedocles said many of the same things, such as this idea that there is something in us that is divine, right?
01:10:53
Speaker
And for Plato, it's this idea that our souls lived in Platonic heaven before we were born. And so, by training in this life, we can become more like God. Empedocles believed the very same thing, and Empedocles was for sure a mystic. So, we see some more evidence of mysticism in Plato.
01:11:14
Speaker
And maybe the best evidence of mysticism is that Plato had some very Pythagorean ideas. Pythagoras is essentially a religious figure. Some philosophers like David Conan Wolfstorff say that he wasn't at all a philosopher. Say that Pythagoras was just a religious leader. We shouldn't even count him as a philosopher. So let's go ahead and accept that Pythagoras was a mystic.
01:11:41
Speaker
Well, Plato adopted many Pythagorean ideas. So there it is. Plato was a mystic, right? What ideas did he borrow from the Pythagoreans? Well, we've already talked about reincarnation, but here are a few other ones. In the Academy, they had communal meals and sacrifices to the Muses and Apollo, just like in Pythagorean communities.
01:12:06
Speaker
The idea for the real definition of you know things like justice and virtue, those might have come from the Pythagoreans. Here's another bit of evidence in a dialogue called the Timaeus. Plato gives a myth about a God who imposes mathematical order on chaos, creating the world as we know it.
01:12:33
Speaker
and along the way, setting up a rational standard by which humans can live. Well, that idea is also Pythagorean. Another Pythagorean idea that Plato seems to endorse is that in order to make everyone happy, in order to create the conditions where everyone will be happy, we have to essentially bring about an ideal city, the perfect state.
01:13:03
Speaker
And this idea was put forward by a couple of Pythagoreans. One of them was Architas, who was a mathematician and member of the Pythagorean Brotherhood. And and Plato and Architas were buddies. So he might have gotten this idea about creating the perfect society from a Pythagorean. Lastly, Plato was probably a vegetarian,
01:13:31
Speaker
And he was probably an ascetic, which means that he wouldn't you know eat sumptuous feasts, he wouldn't drink apparently, or I should say he seldom drink. So on a day-to-day basis, he would not have any wine. But the last thing I'll mention is that he did have wine at least a couple of times in his life. And we know this because here's the final bit of evidence that I will give you that Plato was a mystic,
01:14:00
Speaker
Plato was an initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries. What this means is that Plato was a member of the cult of Demeter and Persephone, and the way that you become initiated into this cult is through, you essentially have to participate in a reenactment of their myth, the saga of Demeter and Persephone.
01:14:26
Speaker
And what this meant, according to some people, I'm thinking here of Karl Ruck, who has a chapter in a book called The Road to Eleusis. What this seems to have meant is that you have to take a glass of wine that is probably spiked with a psychedelic compound, in other words, a drug, and you you know engage in this initiation ritual.
01:14:55
Speaker
And we have reports, according to Ruck, who is a classicist over at Boston University, that you know Plato reports having seen, here is the ah the Greek word phantasmata.
01:15:10
Speaker
In other words, ghostly apparitions. That suggests a kind of intoxication, right? This isn't just regular wine in there. I've had plenty of wine and I've never seen a ghost. And so there might've been something else in this wine, something psychedelic. It seems then that Plato did drink at least once and it was to join a cult of a mystery religion.
Plato's Political Philosophy and Democracy
01:15:41
Speaker
So those are the first four lenses by which we can try to understand Plato. I still have two different ways that we can try to approach the man, two different ways of understanding him. However, the next lens is going to take some time to flesh out. And that's because it has to do with his political philosophy.
01:16:11
Speaker
This philosophy, once we get into it, will prove to be unsettling for some people. And that's because on one interpretation of Plato, he did not think very much of democracy. In fact, he thought it was one of the worst forms of government.