IDEAS CONTROL THE WORLD -- OUR DEBT TO PLATO!

IDEAS CONTROL THE WORLD

OUR DEBT TO PLATO

Ideas control the world.

James Abram Garfield (1831 – 1881)
Twentieth President of the United States of America


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005

If you want to identify the source of the joy and sorrow, the pleasure and the pain, beauty and ugliness in the world, you would do well to see the connection of these emotions to ideas that have spawned them, ideas once born were doomed to be interpreted and reinterpreted until they often meant the exact opposite of what they were intended to mean. Take the idea of brotherly love.

Religion for all its assertions that it is the righteous possessor of truth is at root an idea. This was brought home to me in Time magazine (December 12, 2005). Andrew Sullivan, in his interesting article, points out that the new German Pope Benedict XVI’s draconian measures against gays for being or becoming priests are inconsistent with the idea advocated by Jesus to hate the sin but never the sinner; that “he who would be without sin cast the first stone.”

It would seem that ideas like everything else erode with time and are reduced to acronyms such as, “WWJT?” – or – “What Would Jesus Think?”

Author Sullivan reminds us that Jesus wasn’t into stereotypes. Take Mary Magdalene. She was a sinner in the biblical sense, but Jesus did not reject her, but embraced her as a person worthy of love. Jesus believed pigeonholing people into categories was not only wrong, but also not useful.

People of ideas don’t have to write books, be revered by the public or courted by people in power. People such as Socrates and Jesus captured the spirit and weaved the invisible themes of their times into a tapestry of thought that would grow in prominence far after their parting.

WESTERN THOUGHT AND AN UGLY LITTLE MAN

Socrates was an ugly little man in the physical sense, but beautiful in a soulful sense. He wandered about Athens engaging his fellow citizens in debate without portfolio or prominence. Plato, on the other hand, was tall and handsome and born around 427 B.C., when Socrates was 42.

In his late teens, Plato became enraptured of this peculiar man, as did several of his aristocratic friends. They followed Socrates through the streets of Athens, accepting with good humor as he reduced their patrician arrogance to students lost in a wilderness, a wilderness that he understood and walked every day.

The importance of ideas is as much on how they arrive in the fabric of society as to whoever becomes the personification of their expression. You will see in this series of little essays that the men of ideas may have relevance to our time, but it is also important to note that their ideas were created out of the world they inhabited, a world that often misunderstood them as well as their ideas.

PLATO’S TIME

Plato came of age during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war in which Athens suffered a total and humiliating defeat in 404 B.C. He was twenty-three when the war ended.

Sparta then imposed a dictatorship of thirty tyrants, some of whom were Plato’s relatives and Socrates’ fellow students. This led to corruption, chaos, confusion, and rebellion with democracy eventually being restored.

The irony is that it was the new democratic government of Athens that tried Socrates for religious heresy and corrupting of the youth of Athens. He was executed in 399 B.C. by choosing not to recant his ways or to admit the charges of corruption by swallowing hemlock. Plato was then twenty-eight, and never held democracy in much esteem thereafter.

This wrenching event found Plato turning his back on public life, inspiring him instead to turn to philosophy. But first, after the execution of Socrates, he had to flee to safety with other followers. Plato took temporary refuge in Megara in Greece with the philosopher Euclides. He then traveled widely in Greece, Egypt and Italy and commenced to write his dialogues in the format of the conversations Socrates had had with his fellow Athenians.

A decade later, now thirty-eight, he traveled to Syracuse in Sicily to study Pythagorean philosophy, eventually returning to Athens in 387 B.C. at the age of forty, founding his Academy. Aristotle was among his young students with whom we will learn more in a later essay. The Academy discussed philosophy and mathematics and lasted until A.D. 527, or nearly a thousand years.

He returned to Syracuse in 367 B.C. at the age of sixty in an attempt to mold the city’s young tyrant, Dionysus II, into a philosopher-king, which was his utopian idea of governance. It failed to take hold. He revisited Syracuse six years later in 361 B.C. to attempt the process again. It failed so miserably that it placed him in personal danger and he had to flea for his life.

He never made such an attempt again, but turned his complete attention to the dialogues that featured Socrates as the protagonist. These secured his reputation. He died at the age of eighty in Athens in 347 B.C.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME

Plato lived in a transitional period both for Athens and for the Greek civilization. There was a literary boom in his time as histories and philosophies of the past were recorded and critically studied.

Meanwhile, religious rituals and myths of the gods and titans were coming under greater scrutiny after the death of Socrates, as scholars and philosophers were adopting a more worldview compared to Greece’s more relaxed ethnocentrism.

A whole set of traditional values had fallen into doubt led by itinerant philosophers known as sophists. They preached that morals were relative and not specific. For a fee, sophists provided instruction in rhetoric and debate selling people with the idea the only measure of what is right or true is who comes out of the debate on top.

Sophists capitalized on the vulnerable void left by the disenchantment of citizens with ancient myths and religion, as the Greek world moved toward a more rational aspect.

Old values no longer computed with what people were experiencing in their own lives, and therefore these values were losing their relevance. With no new values to replace them, moral relativism became popular with sophist bravado being taken as wisdom.

It was a time when man was searching for understanding of the world and his place in it. This thirst for knowing would give birth to Western mathematics, science, psychology and ethics, as well as Western philosophy.

Sophists were relatively new in Plato’s day, but he considered them from the first the enemy of virtue. His Republic is his answer to sophist relativism, using dialogue to find a solid grounding for moral values posing questions of popular positions, and then using dialectics to cross-examine these positions to recognize and refute sophist errors and assist readers in making positive discoveries in rational principles.

Plato perfected this style over time by the systematic process of dividing a position into parts and then making generalizations that would advance the idea.

For example, Plato’s “theory of forms” maintains there are two levels of reality: the visible world of sight and sound. We can recognize beauty in a painting or hear it in a voice, and therefore have a general sense of beauty whichever form it takes.

This capacity to recognize beauty is abstract and therefore invisible and lives in the mind. We take the conceptual beauty with us as memory and it lives in our minds as an extension of us.

Plato, however, does not develop this theory of forms, as he apparently felt no such need. It was self-evident. In essence, the “theory of forms” represents his attempt to cultivate our capacity for conceptual and abstract thought, something we still struggle with to this day.

In the Republic and Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as divided into three parts: sensual (appetite), spiritual, and rational. He explains our psychological complexity partly to provide justification for philosophy as the highest of all pursuits, and being representative of the highest part of the soul, the rational part.

Psychology grew out of philosophy. What is interesting is that psychology has never found a more comfortable home since leaving its philosophical roots. At various times in the past century, psychology has mimicked mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and science, never quite leaving religion. There are more than sixty disciplines and sub-disciplines in psychology today. Small wonder the expression “homeless mind” has come into prominence in recent decades.

Plato acknowledges and seeks to explain the fact that we all experience inner conflict. This is the basis of his psychology. But his theory seeks not only to explain this inner conflict but also to present the rational part of the soul as superior. Philosophy, according to Plato, is essentially the practice of refining our rationality.

Another contribution of Plato is that he recognized the importance of education as an aspect of community health and well being. He would be appalled to see that education has become essentially job training instead of life enhancing.

Perhaps hard to believe, but Plato was into pre-natal care with exercises for pregnant women to ensure the healthy birth of their babies.

Plato grew to maturity in a transitional society in which corruption was rampant, moral standards had been discarded, and people were easily inflamed by seductive and hollow sophist rhetoric. He saw his fellow Athenians eating, drinking, and indulging in unrestrained sexual hedonism and concluded his generation was hopelessly corrupt. He recognized a society with a corrupt soul is not inclined to listen to arguments of the efficacy of virtue, or that a virtuous life is a better life. So, he redirected his energies.

Instead, he turned his attention to children. His focus was on teaching children from an early age to live virtuous lives and to seek wisdom. That was the aim of his Academy. Education, he insisted, provides the child with a tolerant as well as discriminating mind, a mind that can be molded into embracing rather than denying reality with the goal to make for a better world. No one has ever improved on this idea, or indeed, on this agenda.

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Author’s note: This is one of a series of Dr. Fisher’s essays on “Ideas Control the World.”