PLATO INTRODUCTION RICHARD KRAUT Plato (427-347 BCE) was born into an aristocratic and wealthy Athenian family, and during his early years he experienced the intellectual and political ferment of his time and place. Many of the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were written during the last quarter of the fifth century, and the moral and political conflicts they dramatized for their fellow Athenians became his problems as well. Plato's youth also roughly coincided with the Peloponnesian War (431-404), which ended in the defeat of democratic Athens at the hands of Sparta. At the close of the war, Sparta installed in Athens a government of thirty rulers (called “Thirty Tyrants” by later generations), who were selected for their antidemocratic sympathies. One of the most ruthless among them, Critias, was the cousin of Plato's mother; another, Charmides, was her brother. Both appear as interlocutors in some of Plato's dialogues. Like many young people of his time, Plato fell under the spell of Socrates (469-399), an Athenian philosopher whose way of life is vividly preserved in Plato's Apology. Socrates wrote nothing and professed ignorance, but his suspicion that no one possesses moral knowledge, and his conviction that we must spend our lives searching for it, inspired many of his followers, Plato among them, to abandon their worldly ambitions and to live a philo- sophical life. The Thirty who had been installed by Sparta were overthrown and democracy was re- stored in 403; but a few years later, in 399, Socrates was brought to trial and found guilty of not believing in the city's gods, of introducing new gods, and of corrupting the young. Some scholars believe that the prosecution of Socrates was motivated partly by the perception that he was a danger to the restored democracy. It is noteworthy that Plato's account of the speech Socrates gave in his own defense, the Apology (apologia means “defense"), contains both antipopulist elements (31–32) and a reminder that Socrates disobeyed the Thirty (32). Evi- dently, he could not easily be classified as a democrat or an antidemocrat. Similarly, in the Crito, Socrates is described as a man so satisfied with the Athenian legal system that he has hardly left the city's walls (52–53), and yet he insists that one should follow the commands of an expert and pay no attention to the opinions of the many (47). But were not the laws of democratic Athens an expression of the opinion of the many? Socrates does not explain the basis for his high regard for Athenian law. Still more perplexing is an apparent inconsistency between the willingness Socrates ex- presses in the Apology to engage in various forms of disobedience and the arguments he accepts in the Crito for obeying one's city and its laws. He tells the jury that he will obey the god who has commanded him to philosophize rather than any orders they give him (29), and 1 PLATO 2 personified Laws of Athens, that he is subordinate to Athens as a child is to a parent or a yet in the Crito he refuses to escape from jail because he accepts the idea, proposed by the slave to a master (50-51). If Socrates is willing to disobey his jurors, then why is he not It is unlikely that Plato means to portray Socrates as a muddled thinker. On the contrary, equally willing to disregard their decision that he is to be punished by death? the impression he means to create is that Socrates is a man of penetrating insight and great provoke his readers into philosophical reflection. Just as his conversations with Socrates les argumentative skill: The apparent difficulties in Socrates ideas are the devices Plato uses to him to philosophy, so he uses Socrates in his works to produce the same effect in us. Plato's dialogues create a sense of unfinished business: lines of thought are disrupted, and gaps in the argument remain unfilled. It is often difficult to know what Plato intends, because he never speaks in his own voice. He uses dramatic characters and portrays a clash of views because he regards the written word as a stimulus to philosophical insight rather than as the embodiment of wisdom. We are told by ancient sources that after the death of Socrates in 399, Plato left Athens and spent time in Sicily, North Africa, and Egypt. Several of the thinkers he visited were associated with the Pythagorean school-a group of philosophers (named after the school's sixth-century founder, Pythagoras) who held that the human soul is reborn into other human and animal bodies after death. They were also intensely interested in the mathemat- ical relationships (for example, in musical scales) that underlie many physical phenomena. As Plato moved beyond such early works as the Apology and Crito, both of these Pythago- rean ideas—the transformation of the soul in its many lives and the mathematical nature of reality-came to the fore in his writings. When he returned to Athens in 387, he established a school (called the “Academy," after the grove beyond the city walls that was sacred to the hero Academos) devoted to the study of philosophical and scientific problems. Ancient writers describe two further visits of Plato to Sicily, in 367 and 361, undertaken to influence the course of Syracusan politics, both ending in failure. He remained the head of the Acad. emy until his death in 347. Although Socrates insists in the Apology that we cannot know what comes after death, in the Phaedo (a dialogue in which he holds his final conversation, before drinking a poison and dying) he presents a series of arguments for the immortality of the soul. One of the most striking components of this dialogue and others that were written during this period is their affirmation of the existence of a new kind of objective reality, which Socrates calls a "form" or "idea." (Capital letters-"Form," "Idea"--are sometimes used to name these objects, al- though this is not Plato's practice.) For example, the form of equality (Plato is thinking of the mathematical relationship) is not something that can be observed by the senses, but it exists nonetheless. It is an eternal and changeless object that can be known only by means of reason. The equal objects we observe are in some way defective copies of the perfect form: they are called equal because they somehow share in or participate in the form of equality. Plato does not attempt to give a complete list of the forms, but he believes that many of the words we use in mathematics ("triangle," "line," "two") and in evaluative discourse ("jus- tice," "beauty," "good") are really names of these abstract objects. Whenever we speak, we are referring to forms, though most people assume that they are merely talking about a visible and perishable world. They are, Plato thinks, living in a dream world: they fail to realize that 3 TRODUCTION what they observe is a mere appearance and that a greater reality-the world of the forms- stands behind the appearances. In The Republic (composed after the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo), Plato pursues a ques- tion that lies at the heart of Socrates' life and death. Although Socrates was a man of the highest moral integrity, he was thought to be so dangerous to his community that the major- ity of a jury of 501 fellow citizens condemned him to die. Since just action sometimes leads to death, since it can lie hidden from others and even be misinterpreted as injustice, does that not cast the most serious doubt on its value? Plato's guiding assumption, which he inherits from Socrates, is that no progress can be made in answering this question until we come to a fuller understanding of what justice is. (The Greek word is dikaiosune; in some contexts, its meaning is broader than that of our "justice" and encompasses any kind of right treatment of others.) Book The Republic portrays a series of unsuccessful attempts to define jus- tice. Socrates here plays the role of someone who lacks knowledge and whose mission it is to reveal to others that they are equally ignorant. Although Thrasymachus, the most formi- dable interlocutor Socrates faces, is eventually defeated in argument, he plays a crucial role in the dialogue: any attempt to vindicate the life of a just person must address itself to the cynicism and immorality that Thrasymachus represents. Plato seems to be saying, in effect, that there is a Thrasymachus in all of us and that we can exorcise him only by means of a philosophical inquiry as wide ranging as The Republic. Starting with Book II, Socrates sheds his role as an ignorant inquirer who merely poses problems for others. For the remainder of the dialogue, he becomes a systematic philosopher who puts forward a grand theory about the nature of human beings, the ideal state, the soul, mathematics, knowledge, and the highest realities. His main interlocutors (Glaucon and Adeimantus-Plato's brothers) occasionally interact with him, but they play a role far differ- ent from the ones assigned to Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus in Book I. The strategy pursued throughout the remainder of The Republic is to exploit the fact that it is not merely individuals who can be characterized as just or unjust. We also use these terms to praise or discredit certain forms of government. Perhaps, then, we can grasp the nature of justice by asking what leads to the existence of a political community and what the justice of such a community consists in. This attempt to construe political and individual justice as the same property eventually leads to the proposal that justice consists in each part of a thing doing its own activity. In a just city or state, each position is filled by a person who is quali- fied to contribute to the good of the whole community. Similarly, in a just human being, each part of the soul operates in a way that best serves the whole human being. By the end of Book IV, Socrates seems to be on the verge of completing his demonstra- tion of the great value of justice-but, in a sense, his argument has only begun. The institu- tions of the ideal city--particularly abolition of the traditional family among rulers and eugenic sharing of sexual partners-have not yet been fully discussed. Plato's aim is to foster the greatest possible unity in the city, and he is willing to go to the greatest lengths to guarantee that his citizens owe their strongest allegiance to each other, rather than to blood relatives. But the topic that looms largest in Books V, VI, and VII is the proposal that the best political community is one that gives complete authority to rigorously trained and mor- ally flawless philosophers. Strictly speaking, the only real philosophers are those whose understanding of value is based on their study of the forms, and in particular the form of the PLATO "good.” Socrates refrains from saying how good is to be defined, and in this sense the entire project of the Republic is radically incomplete. But he seems to be suggesting that goodness has a mathematical nature: that is why it is so important that philosophers first be trained as mathematicians before they undertake the study of the highest form. The dialogue reaches its culminating point with its depiction of the philosopher, for he or she is the human being of perfect justice. The search for the value of justice” has led to the conclusion that this virtue is most fully present in those who understand the nature of the highest realities. Justice is the greatest good because the best sort of life is one in which the structure of one's soul is guided by one's love and understanding of the most valuable and real objects there are—the forms. Books VIII and IX round out Plato's argument by portraying the diseased political structures and fragmented psychologies that arise when worldly values—the love of honor, domination, wealth, and sexual pleasure—take priority over all others. In Book X, the peripheral and external rewards of justice, having been dis- missed in Book II, are allowed to return and provide the finishing touches on Socrates' portrait of justice. Since the soul (or at least the rational part of it) does not perish, the good of justice does not come to an end when the body perishes. By postponing the question of posthumous existence to the end of The Republic, Socrates leads us to see that a life of jus- tice would be worth living even if there were no afterlife. Essays on many aspects of Plato's thought can be found in Richard Kraut, The Cam- bridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and in Gail Fine's two volumes, Plato 1 and Plato 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Full dis- cussions of the Apology are provided by Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Socrates on Trial (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), and C. D. C. Reeve, Socrates in the Apology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989). Detailed analysis of the Crito is pre- sented by Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Roslyn Weiss, Socrates Dissatisfied (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). For studies of the Republic, see Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), Nicholas P. White, A Companion to Plato's Republic (In- dianapolis: Hackett, 1979), C. D. C. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), and Richard Kraut, Plato's Republic: Critical Essays (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, edited by Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield, in association with Simon Harrison and Melissa Lane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), contains seven chapters on Plato's politics. Defence of Socrates 17a 18a b b I don't know how you, fellow Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, but for my part I felt myself almost transported by them, so persuasively did they speak. And yet hardly a word they have said is true. Among their many falsehoods, one especially astonished me: their warning that you must be careful not to be taken in by me, because I am a clever speaker. It seemed to me the height of impudence on their part not to be embarrassed at being re- futed straight away by the facts; once it became apparent that I was not a clever speaker at all-unless indeed they call a 'clever speaker one who speaks the truth. If that is what they mean, then I would admit to being an orator, although not on a par with them. As I said, then, my accusers have said little or nothing true; whereas from me you shall hear the whole truth, though not, I assure you, fellow Athenians, in language adorned with fine words and phrases or dressed up, as theirs was: you shall hear my points made sponta- neously in whatever words occur to me- persuaded as I am that my case is just. None of you should expect anything to be put differ- ently, because it would not, of course, be at all fitting at my age, gentlemen, to come before you with artificial speeches, such as might be composed by a young lad. One thing, moreover, I would earnestly beg of you, fellow Athenians. If you hear me defending myself with the same arguments I normally use at the bankers' tables in the market-place (where many of you have heard me) and elsewhere, please do not be surprised or protest on that account. You see, here is the reason: this is the first time I have ever appeared before a court of law, although I am over 70; so I am literally a stranger to the dic- tion of this place. And if I really were a for- eigner, you would naturally excuse me, were I to speak in the dialect and style in which I had been brought up; so in the present case as well I ask you, in all fairness as I think, to disregard my manner of speaking-it may not be as good, or it may be better—but to consider and attend simply to the question whether or not my case is just; because that is the duty of a judge, as it is an orator's duty to speak the truth. To begin with, fellow Athenians, it is fair that I should defend myself against the first set of charges falsely brought against me by my first accusers, and then turn to the later charges and the more recent ones. You see, I have been accused before you by many people for a long time now, for many years in fact, by people who spoke not a word of truth. It is those people I fear more than Anytus and his crowd, though they too are dangerous. But those others are more so, gentlemen: they have taken hold of most of you since childhood, and made persuasive accusations against me, yet without an ounce more truth in them. They say that there is one Socrates, a 'wise man', who pon- ders what is above the earth and investigates everything beneath it, and turns the weaker argument into the stronger. Those accusers who have spread such rumour about me, fellow Athenians, are the dan- gerous ones, because their audience believes that people who inquire into those matters also fail to acknowledge the gods. Moreover, those accusers с с d From Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro, and Crito, translated by David Gallop. Copyright @ 1997 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and translator. The notes are the translator's. 5
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