Plato

428-348 BCE

Selected Works

Plato is less an author than a world of thought. He is probably on of the half-dozen most influential minds in Western civilization. Alfred North Whitehead has said that all Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, an exaggeration (or minimization), but not entirely untrue. The beginning reader cannot hope to explore the entire Platonic world, nor should he attempt it. The readings suggested below enable us to make his acquaintance and that of his master Socrates. And that is all.

A wealthy Athenian who lived through his city-state’s great and also declining days, Plato experienced one supremely crucial event in his long life: his meeting with Socrates. He had many talents, and was drawn, for example, toward both poetry and politics; but Socrates determined him to a life of thought, undertaken on many fronts.

The result of this life was a series of “dialogues,” long and short, some very beautiful, some dull, and most of them spotlighting his master Socrates. The “Socratic method” was part of the atmosphere of the period. Socrates questioned all things, and particularly the meanings men attached to abstract and important words, such as justice, love, and courage. The questioning was real; the truth was finally approached only through the play of minds, that give-and-take we call “dialectic.” This mode of thought exemplified and perfected in the dialogues. They are not mere exercises in mental agility (except occasionally) but works of art in which all the resources of a poetic and dramatic imagination are called into play. The reader of Plato, no less than the reader of Shakespeare, is reading an artist.

You should keep in mind three central Platonic notions: the first is that, as Socrates says, “a life without inquiry is not worth living.” That lies at the heart of everything Plato wrote. The second notion is that virtue is knowledge; the sufficiently wise person will also be sufficiently good. The third notion has to do with the kinds of knowledge most worth having. Plato believed in “Ideas,” invisible, intangible archetypes or prototypes of things and actions and qualities. These latter, as we know them on earth through the distorting veil of the senses are but faint reflections of the heavenly Ideas. We call this mode of apprehending the universe Idealism; and Plato is its father.

His philosophy, however, is not a consistent whole, and in many respects it changed as he grew older and lost faith in humanity’s ability to govern itself wisely. I suggest therefore that the dialogues be read, not as a systematic expositions of dogma, but as the intellectual dramas they are, full of humor, wit, mental play, unforgettable extended similes called myths, and particularly full of one of history’s most fascinating characters, the ugly, charming, mock-modest Socrates.

It might be best to begin with the Apology, in which Socrates defends himself against the charges of atheism and corrupting the youth. As we know, his defense was a failure—he was executed, by self-administered poison, in 399 B.C.E. The dialogue was, however, been a success for almost twenty-four hundred years.

Follow that with the Crito. Here Socrates gives is his reasons for refusing escape form prison. Then perhaps the Protagoras, in many ways the most sheerly brilliant of the dialogues, and the perfect exemplification of Plato using all his talents. Some may wish to try the Meno, recording Plato’s famous doctrine of recollection. Then comes the Symposium, practically a drama in its movement and structure. This deals with love in all its phases, including that accepted Greek passion, love between males. It deals also with drunkenness, as well as with more exalted matters.

After this perhaps the Phaedo. The sections on immortality may be skimmed or skipped, but the last few pages, describing Socrates’ noble death, are required reading. Many good judges have felt them to be the finest short piece of narrative ever written. Finally, absorb as much as you can of Plato’s most ambitious and rather difficult work, the Republic, which outlines his highly conservative ideal states and is the ancestor of all Utopias and Dystopias—see Huxley and Orwell—that have since appeared.

So many of our notions and ways of thought go back to Plato (including some fantastic and even harmful ones) that knowing nothing of him means knowing less about one’s self. To discover Plato is not merely to discover a masterly intellect. It is to come face to face, if you are an inheritor of the Western tradition, with much of the hitherto unsuspected content of your own mind.