"History-Makers: Plato"

In the golden age of classical Athens, the average citizen had exactly two fears. The war with Sparta, and talking with Socrates. The Spartans, at least, were outside the city walls, but that wily Socrates was even more terrifying because he could be anywhere. You might be at a party for elite Athenians, walking through the Agora marketplace, or even waiting in line to be put on trial, but as soon as you smelled Socrates coming, you knew you were in trouble. Then, once he stepped barefoot into your line of sight and heard you so much as thinking, this disheveled goblin of a man would delight in dissecting every aspect of your conscience question by question. Why do you hold your opinions? Are you doing enough to be a good person? Are you qualified to know what goodness even means? In the eyes of the Athenian public, Socrates was a vulture, scavenging the city for errant ideas ready to dive on any offhand comments or boasts of wisdom. Socrates was, by all accounts, profoundly irritating to political bigwigs and self-proclaimed experts, but he was undeniably an upright citizen. Having served in the Athenian army on three occasions and holding a deep respect for the laws of the city, and the boisterous Athenian youths absolutely loved the guy. Among that bunch, none was more devoted than his student Plato. Born to an aristocratic family in the mid-420s BC, Plato grew up among the leading political elite during the height of the Peloponnesian War, whereupon he bravely ditched any chance of a career in business or politics to instead study philosophy. My hero. Around 387 BC, Plato founded an informal academy on his family estate where Athenians could Plato's academy inspired other philosophical schools across Greece, such as the Lycaon of his student Aristotle, and it remained in use until its untimely destruction in the 80s BC. Long story, blame the Romans. Yet, like many a frustrated Athenian citizen, Plato could never escape Socrates, and Plato's greatest philosophical legacy lies in his Socratic Dialogues, a collection of 30-odd philosophical discussions featuring his beloved mentor. These are not the first written works of philosophy, nor the first to ask big questions about the nature of the world and our place in it, but Plato's approach is so thoroughly systematic and wide-ranging in its treatment of ethics, politics, epistemology, and abstract concepts that we can rightly credit Plato with creating the analytical toolkit of Western philosophy, elevating it from a field of casual inquiry into a defined system of investigation. In short, the man is good, but more than anything else, it's the dynamic between Socrates and Plato which makes these dialogues so darn captivating. To see how, ask Anume Philosophia. Now, Plato had studied with Socrates for at least a decade before striking out on his own, and the instigating factor was Socrates dying. Because being a compulsive conversationalist wasn't a crime in ancient Athens, and neither was being annoying, but Socrates was such a profound pain in the ass that three Athenians brought him up on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth in the hopes of getting him exiled or killed. And Socrates was so stubborn, it worked perfectly. They held a trial, he told them to piss off, they sentenced him to death, he drank the poison, and simple as that, he's on a boat to the river Styx. And after that rather traumatic experience, Plato's outlet for grief, and at least a little rage, was writing, codifying the memory of his mentor through the activity he'd loved most, dialogue. At the time, and basically ever since, philosophy was usually written as a treatise, where the author talks at you, but Plato instead adapted Athens' local style of theatrical drama. The dialogue format was certainly new and unique, but it's really a philosophy play, so it made perfect sense as a distinctly Athenian mode of philosophy as well as a Socratic one. It also helped solve the issue of Socrates' complete disdain for writing. He loved to talk, but thought that an idea dies as soon as it hits the papyrus. Writing is static. It can't converse, it can't react, but usefully, it also can't drink poison, so Plato was willing to do it anyway. And by writing dialogues instead of treatises, Plato upheld the Socratic ideal of lively debate and, in some cases, preserved actual discussions Socrates likely had. Among the earliest and most famous of Plato's dialogues are the Euthyphro, Apology, and Credo, which depict the trial and imprisonment of Socrates leading to his death in the later Phyto dialogue. These are a small slice of Plato's total work, but they offer the most dramatic portrayal of Socrates' character and combine into the foundational narrative that all the other dialogues build on. So what does Plato show us? The first dialogue in the series sees Socrates awaiting his trial outside the law court where he meets a man named Euthyphro who's prosecuting his own father for killing a murderer. He knows this is bold of him, but he considers it the pious thing to do. So Socrates asks, what is piety, really? And Euthyphro offers some ideas, but Socrates keeps finding problems. So they end up going in a circle without landing on a solid answer. Critically, Socrates isn't being a mean-spirited contrarian, but genuinely wants to find an answer and is willing to defy conventional ideas to get at deeper truths. But the dialogue also asks how Athenians have any right to accuse Socrates of impiety when they themselves can't even define it. This leads right into the apology, which is not apologetic in the slightest, but rather comes from the Greek word for speaking in defense. Here we listen to Socrates' arguments for his innocence against the crimes of impiety and corrupting the youth, as well as a general defense for his philosophical questioning that the Athenians are actually upset about. He compares himself to a gadfly biting a lazy horse, an annoying presence that's necessary to stimulate the Athenians to be better, and declares that even if acquitted, he'll never After his defense, the 501-man jury finds him guilty, and this triggers a fascinating step in the Athenian legal process. After a guilty verdict, the prosecution and the defense each propose a punishment, and the jury votes again. This encourages moderation, so when the prosecution proposed death, the assumption was Socrates would request exile and most likely get it. But instead he doubled down, saying if you want to know what I deserve, I'll tell you what I deserve. Put me up in the Prydynaean and give me free meals for life because I'm doing Athens a service, and that's what I deserve. Naturally, the jury voted for death, but Socrates remained undaunted. The beauty of the language in the apology is Plato's gift, but that unshakeable moral core was all Socrates, and that attitude pervades the next two dialogues. Now the day before Socrates' trial, a ship left port for a sacred festival on the island of Delos, and until it came back, no executions were allowed to take place. So Socrates stayed in prison for a month until his friend Credo arrives to tell him the ship was spotted off the coast of Sunion and would be back in the city soon after. Credo offers Socrates one last chance to escape, but Socrates refuses on principle. Sure the guards couldn't care less if he bolted so long as he just left the city, but justice is justice and Socrates would rather die. In the next dialogue, he sure as hell does. The phaedo portrays the last conversation with his students about the immortality of the soul before the sun sets and he drinks the poison hemlock. The death is immaculately dramatized as his friends swing between laughing and weeping while Socrates remains calm, serene, and pious to the very end. This is the stuff religions are made of, but Plato leverages the drama of it all to better explore those topics of piety, justice, and death his characters investigate. Now we have an interesting problem here, because Socrates is all aboard the immortal soul train in the phaedo, but earlier in the apology, he explicitly does not know what happens to him after he dies. And that gets to the big question in Platonic philosophy. Where does the historical Socrates end and Plato's character of Socrates begin? The simplest answer is chronological, as Plato's early dialogues hew much closer to how other sources paint the historical Socrates and have more basis in actual conversations, while the later dialogues see Plato get more inventive, developing Socrates into a character that he can drop in any story and set loose. Early dialogues often have plausible context or full historical precedent like the trial, but middle dialogues like the Republic create whole scenarios and characters for Socrates to bounce off of. We can also distinguish the dialogues by what Socrates is doing in them. The early dialogues typically follow a format of some smartypants declaring they know something about politics, religion, ethics, or the like, whereupon Socrates exercises carte blanche to ruin this person's whole career, systematically skewering their positions and leaving them as a confused blubbering mess before carrying happily along with his day. This is the Socrates who Athens wanted dead. However, the middle and late dialogues show Socrates offering ideas for a change, possibly in line with Plato developing his ideas and delicately weaving them into the texts. Socrates in the latter dialogues takes a more rigorously mathematical approach and has more interest in abstract concepts. He still operates through lines of questioning, but we can clearly see Plato's hand in this version of the character. Looking at the structure of the Republic, book 1 reads as a standard early dialogue investigating the question of justice and ending with no clear answer, but in book 2 Socrates puts forward his own definition, using the metaphor of a city's government to illustrate how justice works in a single person. And this discussion drives the subsequent nine books of the Republic. After several tangents and extra philosophical scaffolding to support the main argument, the metaphor falls apart, but several key ideas make it through intact. Most significant being the theory of forms, the intangible ideals and concepts that govern the universe. These forms are reflected down into mathematics, the physical world, and then images. So this drawing of blue is an image of me, who is an image of humanity, which is itself an image of the concept of life. This is where we glimpse Plato's own philosophy. He never states it outright, because he also believes that philosophy is a process rather than a singular truth, but he gives Socrates more and more ideas that survive scrutiny and convince other characters in the dialogues. Those ideas, taken on their own, form an entire corpus of thought that's gone on to inspire secular philosophy and Abrahamic theology for millennia. That all is plenty impressive, but it's not why Plato is the best philosopher. See, the dialogue format isn't just a cute recreation of Socrates' antics or a clever riff on Athenian theater, it's the only way to convey philosophy that meets the Socratic ideal. Plato recognized that text becomes fixed and static once it's written, so his strategy is to make the reader participate with him and Socrates and the other characters. When the Euthyphro ends without an answer on what piety is, that invites the reader to use what they've learned and try their own hand at it. So the dialogue continues in our minds millennia after Plato took his hand off the papyrus. The dialogues leave open questions, so as long as the text is read, the conversation remains alive as we craft our own answers. With the possible exception of Jewish philosophy in the Midrashic tradition, which is a beautiful communal exploration of the Torah unfolding over generations, almost no other Western philosopher does this. Plato's distinctly Athenian innovation is the best mode to convey philosophy, and I'm baffled this isn't the main way we do this. The craft of discussion and the process of investigating our ideas through questions gets us a greater understanding of real world and theoretical truths. If we read a regular old treatise and just take an author's word for it, we're only coming at the idea from one angle, which then leaves some rhetorical flank exposed for someone like Socrates to rip it apart. But when we use the Socratic method to challenge our ideas, reconfigure, and strengthen them, that's when we approach real wisdom. Now go read a dialogue and start asking some questions. Thank you so much for watching. I first thought of doing this video last summer when I was rereading the Euthyphro and thought, wait, this is, like, really, really good? There are plenty of other Platonic gems I didn't get to cover, like the Protagoras and the Gorgias, but maybe that just means you should go read them for yourself and see what I'm on about. Oh no, what a shame, you just have to go read Plato now. Ah, damn, sorry. Anyway, I'll see you in the next one.