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The Uncanny Parallels Between Plato and the Upanishads

Le Char d'Apollon, by Odilon Redon
Know the Self as the rider in the chariot, the body as the chariot itself; know the intellect as the charioteer, and the mind as the reins. —Katha Upanishad

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.

Coming to Indian philosophy after having written three books on Greek philosophy, I have been struck by the parallels. And I have been asking myself: are the similarities between Greek and Indian thought the result of direct or indirect communication, or are they the result of a common source or common grammar (Sanskrit being closely related to Greek)? Or are they rather a universal product of the human mind?

The possibility of contact cannot be dismissed. By Plato’s lifetime, the Persian Empire had brought the Greeks and Indians within the same vast political and commercial sphere. Ideas, like goods and people, could travel great distances. But possibility is not proof, and there is no evidence that Plato himself encountered the Upanishads.

Introduction to the Upanishads

‘Upanishad’ means something like ‘hidden connections’, ‘secret teaching’, or ‘esoteric doctrine’, literally, ‘a sitting at (the feet of the teacher)’. Although part of the Vedas, the Upanishads tend to take a dim, if diplomatic, view of what went before. ‘Of what use,’ asks the Svetashvatara Upanishad, ‘is the Rig Veda to one who does not know the Spirit from whom the Rig Veda comes?’ By a strict definition, there are around 108 Upanishads, but the first dozen are the most important.

Like the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers, some of these mukhya (major) Upanishads are in prose, others are in verse.

Although it is the philosophy and poetry that are retained, the content of the Upanishads is very diverse. The Upanishads fit into the Vedic tradition, and, like older layers of the Vedas, may include mantras, rituals, creation myths, lineages of teachers, historical narratives, and the like. At their best and most original, they take the form of a philosophical dialogue, not unlike those of Plato, with named interlocutors presenting and debating various viewpoints.

For example, in the Great Forest Upanishad (which is the oldest Upanishad, dating from around or before the sixth century BCE), the sage Yajnavalya engages in philosophical debate with, among others, his wife Maitreyi, the sage Gargi (another, rare, woman), and King Janaka of Videha—who salutes Yajnavalya with ‘namaste’. In the Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni—the guru (teacher) of Yajnavalya—engages in debate with his son, Svetaketu.

Yajnavalya, Uddalaka, and Svetaketu are among the first philosophers in recorded history.

Brahman and Atman

This being philosophy, there is a tendency to abstraction, to reach ‘at the truth behind the truth’ (satyasya satyam).

The central vision is one of pantheism (all is God) or panentheism (all is in God), with God hidden in nature ‘even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made’. God is Brahman and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman.

The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation (moksha).

These ideas are neatly encapsulated in this passage from the Mundaka Upanishad:

As rivers flowing into the ocean find their final peace and their name and form disappear, even so the wise become free from name and form and enter into the radiance of the Supreme Spirit who is greater than all greatness. In truth who knows God becomes God.

Parallels With Parmenides and Greek Philosophy

The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of the pre-Socratic Parmenides (d. c. 400 BCE), who, in his poem, On Nature, contrasted the way of truth to the way of opinion. Through a chain of strict a priori deductive arguments from premises deemed incontrovertible, Parmenides argued that, despite appearances (the way of Opinion), the universe must consist of a single, undifferentiated, and indivisible unity, which he called ‘the One’.

These verses from the Katha Upanishad could credibly have been penned by Parmenides:

Who sees the many and not the one, wanders on from death to death. Even by the mind this truth is to be learned: there are not many but one. Who sees variety and not unity wanders on from death to death.

To bolster the philosophy of Parmenides, his student and lover Zeno of Elea produced a set of paradoxical arguments, including the famous Achilles and the Tortoise, designed to undermine ordinary assumptions about motion, space, time, and plurality.

Just as Plato (d. 348 BCE) leaned upon Heraclitus and his theory of flux (‘No one ever steps twice into the same river’) for his conception of the sensible or phenomenal world, so he leaned upon Parmenides for his conception of the intelligible or noumenal world, which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the Forms.

Already, Greek and Indian thought appear to be circling around the same fundamental problem: are the change and multiplicity presented to our senses real, or are they merely manifestations of something single, eternal, and unchanging?

Parallels With Plato

Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a pair of Pythagorean philosophers, is essentially an Upanishad in both form and content. The philosopher, says Socrates, who is soon to drink of the hemlock, aims at truth, but his body is constantly deceiving and distracting him:

The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture… It fills us with needs, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense…

Absolute justice, absolute beauty, or absolute good cannot be apprehended by the senses but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate the soul from the body. As death is the complete separation of body and soul, the philosopher aims at death and can be said to be almost dead.

This idea of the soul being waylaid by the body is also found in the Maitri Upanishad, which was written at around the same time as the Phaedo:

The human soul rules the body; but the immortal spiritual soul is pure like a drop of water on a lotus leaf. The soul is under the power of the three constituents and conditions of nature and thus it falls into confusion. Because of this confusion the soul cannot become conscious of the God who dwells within and whose power gives us power to work.

In the Meno, Plato argues that learning is really recollection (anamnesis): the soul already possesses knowledge, and philosophical enquiry merely helps it to remember. Socrates demonstrates the point by questioning an uneducated slave boy until he works out a geometrical problem for himself. The truth, it seems, is not simply out there waiting to be discovered, but somehow already within us—a thought that sits remarkably well with the Upanishadic turn inward towards Atman and self-knowledge.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates, having established its immortality, compares the soul to a chariot with a charioteer and two winged horses. Whereas the chariot of a god has two tame horses, that of a mortal has one tame horse and one unruly one, which is the cause of much hardship for the charioteer.

This passage from the Katha Upanishad appears almost to be elucidating Plato’s chariot allegory:

Know the Atman as the Lord of a chariot; and the body as the chariot itself. Know that reason is the charioteer; and the mind indeed is the reins. The horses, they say, are the senses; and their paths are the objects of sense. He who has not right understanding, and whose mind is never steady is not the ruler of his life, like a bad driver with wild horses.

The two allegories are not identical. Plato divides the soul between charioteer and horses, whereas the Katha splits differently. Yet both arrive at the same extraordinary image: human life as an exercise in charioteering, in which the mind must somehow govern forces that threaten to derail us.

The Form of the Good

For more than two millennia, Western philosophers have been poring over Plato’s elusive Form of the Good. Plato himself devised three interconnected allegories (the sun, line, and cave) merely to point at it. But I can tell you what it is in just one word: Brahman.

Both Brahman and the Form of the Good point beyond the changing world of appearances towards an ultimate principle upon which truth and reality depend. Just as Brahman stands behind the multiplicity of the world as its ultimate ground, so the Form of the Good stands beyond the other Forms as the source of their intelligibility.

Plato even has a theory of reincarnation, leading us to suppose that he must, in a previous life, have been a Brahmin.

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Plato’s Remarkable Vision of Love

Plato's ladder of love
Plato’s ladder of love: from the beauty of the body to Beauty itself.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 19 August 2026.

The Man Who Coined ‘Platonic Love’

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the knowledge of Greek was lost in the West. In around 321 CE, the philosopher Calcidius had published a Latin translation of the first part of Plato’s Timaeus, which for almost 800 years remained the only substantial section of Plato available to the Latin West.

Fortunately, the study of Plato continued in the Byzantine Empire and Islamic world. At the 1438-39 Council of Florence, the Byzantine scholar George Gemistos Plethon reintroduced Plato to the West as part of a failed attempt to repair the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Church and present a united front to the Ottoman Empire (Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453).

While in Florence, Gemistos Plethon made an impression on the banker, politician, and patron of the arts Cosimo de’ Medici, who had, among others, commissioned the David of Donatello, the first freestanding male nude sculpture since antiquity. He persuaded Cosimo to establish an institute and informal discussion group, now known as the Platonic Academy of Florence, which, under Cosimo’s protégé Marsilio Ficino, went on to translate all of Plato’s extant works into Latin. This, in turn, ignited and inflamed the humanist Renaissance.

It is also Ficino who coined the term ‘Platonic love’ (amor platonicus), which first appears in a letter that he wrote to Alamanno Donati in 1476. In 1492, he published a series of Platonic love letters to Giovanni amico mio perfettissimo (‘Giovanni my most perfect friend’), the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti.

Today, ‘Platonic love’ means what Ficino, who lived in a much more closeted time, intended it to mean: a close relationship from which sex and sexual desire are absent, or not acted upon. Whatever it was, Ficino presented his love for Giovanni not as sexual but as elevating. But Plato’s vision of love is a lot more radical and ambitious than Ficino’s idea of it. We glimpse it in dialogues such as the Greater Alcibiades, in the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, and in the Phaedrus, in the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus. It also appears in other dialogues such as the Lysis, the Meno, and the Charmides, in which Socrates sees inside Charmides’ cloak and ‘catches fire’. Then, in the Symposium, Plato literally spells it out.

Socrates and Alcibiades

Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, ‘For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.’ By all accounts, his greatest love was with the famously handsome Alcibiades (450-404 BCE), who was by some twenty years his junior.

In 432, Socrates and Alcibiades fought in the Battle of Potidaea, where the middle-aged plebeian and the young aristocrat became unlikely tent mates. In his Life of Alcibiades, Plutarch relates that ‘all were amazed to see [Alcibiades] eating, exercising, and tenting with Socrates, while he was harsh and stubborn with the rest of his lovers’. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades reports that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life at Potidaea and, even after that, let him keep the prize for valour.

Plato’s Symposium is set in 416, some 16 years after the Battle of Potidaea, and just before the fateful Sicilian Expedition that led Alcibiades to defect to Sparta. The setting is a drinking party hosted by the playwright Agathon. After each of the guests, including Socrates, has made a speech in praise of love, a drunken Alcibiades stumbles in supported by a flute-girl. When Alcibiades entreats everyone to drink and match him in his drunkenness, the other guests object to ‘drinking as if we were thirsty’ and suggest that Alcibiades instead make a speech in praise of Socrates.

Alcibiades says that Socrates always makes him admit that he is wasting his time on his political career while neglecting his several shortcomings. So he tears himself away from him as from the song of a siren and once again lets his love of popularity get the better of him. Socrates may look like a satyr and pose as ignorant, but, like the busts of Silenus (the tutor of Dionysus), he hides bright and beautiful images of the gods within him. Attracted by his wisdom, he tried several times to seduce him, but each time without success. Eventually, he turned the tables round and began to chase the older man, inviting him to dinner and on one occasion persuading him to stay the night. He then lay beside him and put it to him that, of all his lovers, he was the only one worthy of him, and he would be a fool to refuse him any favours if only he could make him into a better man.

Socrates replied in his usual, ironical manner:

Alcibiades, my friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance—like Diomedes, gold in exchange for brass.

After this, Alcibiades crept under the older man’s threadbare cloak and held him all night in his arms—but in the morning arose ‘as from the couch of a father or an elder brother’.

All this, says Alcibiades, took place before Potidaea. But how much of his drunken account is true, and how much invented by Plato to rehabilitate the reputation of Socrates? Socrates—remember—was put to death, in part, for ‘corrupting the youth’.

In the little-known Alcibiades of Aeschines, Socrates relates a conversation that he once had with Alcibiades. Socrates tells his companion that, if he was at all able to improve Alcibiades, this was not through any knowledge or art that he possessed, but only by the force of the love (eros) that the enfant terrible had aroused in him.

The relationship turns the conventional hierarchy of beauty on its head. Alcibiades possesses youth and physical beauty, not to mention birth and position, but it is the old, ugly, and plebeian Socrates who possesses the inner beauty that Alcibiades, when he dares, most desires.

Socrates and Phaedrus

The ostensible theme of Plato’s Phaedrus is love and pederasty, and the dialogue is full of flirtatious banter and sexual innuendo. Socrates persuades the young Phaedrus to pull out the speech on love that he is hiding under his cloak… The grass on which they lie down to read the speech is ‘like a pillow gently sloping to the head’ … After Phaedrus has read the speech, Socrates says, ‘the effect on me was ravishing. And this I owe to you Phaedrus, for I observed you while reading to be in an ecstasy … and like you, my divine darling, I became inspired with a phrenzy.’

But although the Phaedrus appears, especially at first, to be about love, it is more properly about the education of the soul, which might be led to wisdom by the power of love or dialectic (reasoned discourse), although not, as Socrates argues, oratory (rhetoric) or the written word. Just as the Phaedo used to be called, On the Soul, so the Phaedrus might have been called, On the Education of the Soul.

Despite his emphasis on Apollonian reason, Plato recognises that the original impulse for philosophy arises out of something as irrational and Dionysian as love. However, this love, although most fertile, is not of the reproductive kind, and must be reined in if it is to serve its purpose. For Plato, the body with its needs and pleasures is a source of distraction and confusion that holds us back from wisdom. In particular, the needs and desires of the body are why we waste our substance going to work and to war, focussing always on particulars rather than the universals that are the objects of wisdom.

Although Socrates and Phaedrus openly flirt with each other, Plato has them sit beneath a chaste tree. According to Pliny the Elder, the matrons of Athens, at the time of the Thesmophoria (the festival of Demeter and Persephone), used to place the stems and leaves of the chaste in their bedding to temper their lust.

When, at the end of the dialogue, Socrates prays to the gods of the place, he calls himself ‘a temperate man’; and when he asks Phaedrus to complete the prayer, Phaedrus responds, ‘Ask the same for me, for friends have all things in common.’ Thus, it is not as pederastic lovers but as friends and equals that they leave.

The genius of Plato is that the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus is the very embodiment of the pure, ameliorating, elevating love of which they speak. And if this love begins as lust, this lust can be refined and sublimed on the ladder of love.

The ladder of love is the heart of Plato’s theory of love. To learn what it is, we must return to the Symposium and Agathon’s drinking party.

Diotima and the Ladder of Love

After Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and the host, Agathon, it is the turn of Socrates to speak in praise of love (at this point, Alcibiades has not yet barged in). Socrates slips into his famous dialectic mode and gets Agathon to agree that if love is not of nothing, then it must be of something, and if it is of something, then it must be of something that is desired, and therefore of something that is lacking.

Socrates then relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the art of love. This Diotima (the name means, ‘Honoured by the gods’)—who may have been a foil for Aspasia of Miletus—told him that the something that Love lacks and desires consists of beautiful and good things, and especially of wisdom, which is both extremely good and extremely beautiful.

If Love lacks and desires beautiful and good things, and if all the gods are good and beautiful, Love cannot, as most people think, be a god. In truth, Love is the child of Poverty and Resource, always in need but always inventive. He is not a god, but a great spirit (daimon) who intermediates between gods and men. As such, he is neither mortal nor immortal, neither wise nor ignorant, but a lover of wisdom (philosophos).

No one who is wise wants to become wise, just as no one who is ignorant wants to become wise: ‘For herein lies the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself…’ The aim of loving beautiful and good things is to possess them, because the possession of good and beautiful things is called happiness, and happiness is an end in itself.

Love is rather like the philosopher himself: neither a god nor a mortal, but a channel between the two; neither wise nor wholly ignorant, but aware of his lack and driven by it. For Plato, desire and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.

Love and Immortality

Wild animals, said Diotima, enter into a state of love because they seek to reproduce and make themselves immortal. People too seek to make themselves immortal, and are prepared to take great risks, even to die, to attain fame and honour. Some people are pregnant in body and beget children who will preserve their memory, but a few are pregnant in soul and instead beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and more immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another, and a stronger bond of friendship between them.

Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?

For Diotima as for Plato, love is something much larger than sexual or romantic attachment. It is the transcendent force that drives mortal beings to reach beyond their limited selves for the things they lack. It is the engine of art, philosophy, and, of course, of life itself.

The Ladder of Love

Diotima then told Socrates the proper way to learn to love beauty:

A youth should first be taught to love one beautiful body so that he comes to realize that this beautiful body shares beauty with every other beautiful body, and thus that it is foolish to love just one beautiful body. In loving all beautiful bodies, the youth begins to appreciate that the beauty of the soul is superior to the beauty of the body and begins to love those who are beautiful in soul, regardless of whether they are also beautiful in body.

Having thus transcended the physical, he gradually finds that beautiful practices and customs and the various kinds of knowledge also share in a common beauty.

Finally, on the highest rung of the ladder of love, he is able to experience Beauty itself, rather than its various apparitions. By exchanging the various apparitions of virtue for Virtue herself, he gains immortality and the love of the gods.

This is why love is so important, and why it deserves so much praise.

The beautiful youth is not the destination, but only the first rung of the ladder. He is only the apparition of beauty. But if we keep on climbing, we will arrive, first, at the Form of Beauty, and, finally, at the Form of the Good, which is the ultimate source of wisdom, virtue, and happiness. This close association of wisdom, virtue, and happiness is the seed of Aristotle’s virtue ethics.

How the Ladder of Love Changed Love

Before Plato, and for a long time after, people did, of course, fall in love, but they did not believe that this love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today. When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, neither she nor he thought of their attraction as pure or noble or exalting. In the Odyssey, Penelope’s commitment to Odysseus is better understood in terms of dutiful love, or connubial fidelity, than modern, madcap romantic love. When, in the Aeneid, Dido falls in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her passion as a divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. Other models of love in antiquity include the ‘perfect friendship’ of Plato’s student Aristotle and the naturalism, or ‘beastliness’, of the Roman poets Lucretius and Ovid.

On the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, the Jewish and Christian models of love evolved alongside the Greco-Roman ones. In the Old Testament, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his precious son Isaac. But as Abraham is about to slay Isaac, an angel stays his hand. The Sacrifice of Isaac highlights that, although love and morality are important principles, unquestioning obedience to God is more important still, for God is morality, and God is love.

The New Testament, in contrast to the Old, elevates love for one another into the supreme virtue. More than a commandment, love becomes the royal road to redemption. One must even turn the other cheek to love one’s enemies. It is a far cry from the law of retaliation of the Old Testament: ‘…thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth…’

Even so, the Bible, which contains more named characters than Game of Thrones, contains not a single Bridget Jones story. Its greatest human love stories are between two women and two men: Ruth and Naomi, and David and Jonathan.

Jesus may have spoken Greek and might have come under the direct or indirect influence of Platonism. But even if he did not, the later Church sought to align Christian theology with classical philosophy—and Christian love, more properly called charity, and originally directed at God, began to blur with something much more individualistic.

The blending of Christian love with Platonism prepared the ground for the troubadour tradition that began in eleventh century Occitania (broadly, the southern half of France). A troubadour extolled refined or courtly love, which he directed at a married or otherwise unattainable lady, often of a superior rank, as a means of exalting himself and attaining to higher virtue. For the first time, love did not ultimately aim at, or depend on, God—and the Church duly condemned courtly love as a heresy. In a radical cultural reversal, the daughter of Eve turned from devilish temptress to sublime conduit of virtue, an earthly goddess in the place of God.

The troubadour tradition, which had remained an elite and minority movement, died out around the time of the Black Death in 1348, but prepared the ground for the modern conception of romantic love as the only thing left that might save us.

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If you enjoyed this essay, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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It is striking that the great thinkers, from Aristotle to Augustine and Mencius to Montaigne, devoted so much of their time and thought to friendship, but almost none of either to marriage. Grayling’s timely treatise reacquaints us with a great but forgotten good that promises to fulfil so many of our practical, intellectual, emotional, and metaphysical needs. The book principally consists of a history of the philosophy of friendship capped by an account of canonical, often homosexual or homosocial friendships such as that of Achilles and Patroclus and Jonathan and David, who, in the Bible, describes the love of Jonathan as “better even than that of women”. Throughout, Grayling seeks to define friendship and, in so doing, explores its many forms, facets, charms, and consolations.

Perhaps in a desire to be modern, relevant, or politic, Grayling seems to reject the classical notion that, at its best and most meaningful, friendship is a highly elitist good. For the greats, only virtuous men can be ideal friends. Aristotle famously says that, while there are many ways for men to be bad, there is only one way for them to be good, and it is precisely in this sense that an ideal friend is ‘another self’—a historically important notion that Grayling severally dismisses. Because they are all one and the same, virtuous men are predictable, reliable, and therefore worthy of one another’s friendship. In contrast, bad people are in some way unlike themselves, and just as likely to hate other bad people as anyone else.

In my opinion, Plato, whom Grayling underrates, advances by far the most subtle and sophisticated of all theories of friendship, one far superior even to that of Aristotle. Despite the extravagant praise that he lavishes upon friendship, Aristotle is quite clear that the best and happiest life is not that spent in friendship, but in the contemplation of those things that are most true and therefore most beautiful and most dependable. There is a contradiction here: if the best life is a life of contemplation, then friendship is either superfluous or inimical to the best life, and therefore undeserving of the high praise that Aristotle lavishes upon it. It may be, as Aristotle tentatively suggests, that friendship is needed because it promotes contemplation, or that contemplation is only possible some of the time and friendship is needed the rest of the time, or even that a life of friendship is just as good as a life of contemplation. So much for Aristotle, one might say.

Plato’s Lysis may seem to fail in its task of defining friendship, but one should never take Plato or his mouthpiece Socrates at face value. There is far more to the Lysis than a couple of interesting but misguided thoughts on friendship. By discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is not only discussing friendship, but also demonstrating to the youths that, even though they count each other as close friends, they do not really know what friendship is, and that, whatever friendship is, it is something far deeper and far more meaningful than the puerile ‘friendship’ that they share. In contrast to the youths, Socrates knows perfectly well what friendship is, and is only feigning ignorance so as to teach the youths: ‘…and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you…’ More than that, by discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is himself in the process of befriending them. He befriends them not with pleasant banter or gossipy chitchat, as most people ‘befriend’ one another, but with the kind of philosophical conversation that is the hallmark of the deepest and most meaningful of friendships. In the course of this philosophical conversation, he tells the youths that he should ‘greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius’, thereby signifying not only that he places friendship on the same high pedestal as philosophy, to which he has devoted (and will sacrifice) his life, but also that the kind of friendship that he has in mind is so rare and uncommon that even he does not possess it. If friendship ultimately escapes definition, then this is because, like philosophy, friendship is not so much a thing-in-itself as it is a process for becoming. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion. For Plato, friendship and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.

Just as philosophy leads to friendship, so friendship leads to philosophy. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s most important work on friendship (although not generally recognized as such—Grayling fails to mention it), Socrates and Phaedrus go out into the idyllic countryside just outside Athens and have a long conversation about the anatomy of the soul, the nature of true love, the art of persuasion, and the merits of the spoken over the written word. At the end of this conversation, Socrates offers a prayer to the local deities. This is the famous Socratic Prayer, which is notable both in itself and for the response that it elicits from Phaedrus.

Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. —Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

Phaedrus: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.

Plato may fail to define friendship in the Lysis, but in the Phaedrus he gives us its living embodiment. Socrates and Phaedrus spend their time together enjoying the beautiful Attic countryside while engaging in honest and open philosophical conversation. By exercising and building upon reason, they are not only furthering each other’s understanding, but also transforming a life of friendship into a life of joint contemplation of those things that are most true and hence most beautiful and most dependable. If only on the basis of his response to the Socratic Prayer, it is obvious that Phaedrus is another self to Socrates, since he makes the same choices as Socrates and even justifies making those choices on the grounds that their friendship requires it. Whereas Aristotle and Grayling try to tell us what friendship is, Plato lets us feel it in all its allure and transformative power.

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Plato’s Prayer for Inner Beauty, Wisdom, and Temperance

Socrates and Phaedrus beneath a plane tree by the River Illisus outside Athens.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Yesterday, I prepared dinner for some friends, and we recited the Socratic Prayer from Plato’s Phaedrus in lieu of grace, with one person taking the part of Socrates and another that of Phaedrus.

I think I shall be sticking with it: it is absolutely perfect for a dinner among friends.

Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

Phaedrus: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.

Socrates: Let us go [eat].

The prayer comes at the very end of the Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus have spent the afternoon outside the walls of Athens, conversing beneath a plane tree on love, beauty, the soul, rhetoric, and the written word. Before returning to the city, Socrates prays to Pan and the other gods of the place.

His prayer contains three closely related wishes.

First, he asks for beauty in the inward soul. Physical beauty is vulnerable to time and fortune, but beauty of soul—wisdom, goodness, harmony—is both more enduring and more truly our own.

Second, he asks that the outward and inward person be at one. This is a prayer for integrity: that our appearance and conduct should express, rather than conceal or contradict, our inner nature.

Third, he asks to count the wise as wealthy, and to possess no more gold than a temperate person can bear. True wealth lies not in having much, but in needing little—and in having the wisdom to know how much is enough.

Phaedrus then asks to share in the prayer, “for friends should have all things in common.” This final touch transforms a private aspiration into a shared ideal. What better grace could there be among friends?

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To delve deeper into Socrates and Plato, see The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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