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A biography of the father of Western philosophy

In Plato’s Lysis, two boys, Lysis and Menexenus, argue about who is the elder. This seems odd, until one realizes that people back then did not have birthdays, but only birth years or birth cohorts.

Plato is likely to have been born in 428/427 BCE. His father Ariston claimed descent from Codrus, the last king of Athens (d. c. 1068 BCE), who himself claimed descent from Poseidon. His mother Perictione descended, more humbly but in a shorter line, from the law-giver Solon. She had Charmides for a brother and Critias for an uncle. Out of a desire to rehabilitate his mother’s family line, or hark back to happier times, Plato often featured his relatives in his dialogues: not only Critias and Charmides, but also his brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus.

Plato probably bore the name of his father’s father, Aristocles, but his wrestling coach Ariston of Argos took to calling him ‘Plato’ on account of his broad shoulders. Alternatively, the nickname derived from the breadth of his eloquence, or his large forehead. Had it not stuck, he might have been known to us as Aristocles of Collytus. According to some later writers, he was not the son of Ariston but of Apollo himself—earning him a couple more epithets, ‘Son of Apollo’ and ‘Divine teacher’. In another legend, as the infant Plato slept on Mount Hymettus, the bees settled upon his lips to augur the honeyed words that would one day flow from his mouth.

Childhood and Siblings

When Plato was still a boy, his father died, and his mother married Pyrilampes, her widowed maternal uncle. Pyrilampes already had a son, Demus, who was famed for his good looks, and went on to have another son, Antiphon, with Perictione—making Antiphon Plato’s half-brother. Shortly before marrying Perictione, Pyrilampes suffered a shoulder injury at the Battle of Delium, and it might have been from him that Plato first heard about Socrates and his bravery on the battlefield. Pyrilampes enjoyed a close friendship with Pericles, the de facto leader of Athens. After the birth of Antiphon, Pericles dispatched him to Persia to represent Athens. When he returned from the court of Darius with a pride of peacocks, scurrilous tongues accused him of breeding the birds to procure freeborn women for Pericles. Possibly, it is he who first introduced the peacock to Europe.

Plato no doubt took an engaged interest in the education of Antiphon [‘Responsive voice’, the root of ‘anthem’]. In Plato’s Parmenides, one Cephalus encounters Glaucon and Adeimantus in the agora and asks to meet Antiphon, who happens to be acquainted with the famous conversation that passed between Parmenides, Zeno, and the young Socrates. But Antiphon has, by now, given up philosophy for horses: when the party arrives at Antiphon’s house, they find him with a smith fitting a bridle.

Plato’s eldest brother Glaucon [‘Owl-eyed’, ‘Bright-eyed’, or ‘Grey-eyed’] enjoyed music and mathematics and naturally fell under the spell of the Pythagoreans. Both he and Adeimantus distinguished themselves in the Battle of Megara of 424, and in Plato’s Republic Socrates commends him for his ‘godlike virtues in battle’. In his mid-thirties, Glaucon suffered a minor injury, and thereafter devoted himself to finery, frivolling away his fame and fortune on a large estate that he filled with hunting dogs and pedigreed cocks.

In the Republic, Adeimantus [‘Without fear’] claims that most philosophers are ‘strange monsters, not to say utter rogues’ who are made utterly useless by their study (487d). When, in discussing the ideal state, Socrates proposes that the guardians be without property, he objects that they would be unhappy without luxuries.

Neither Plato nor his three brothers had any children, leaving the joys and burdens of family life to their sister Potone, who had no choice in the matter. Pyrilampes and Critias married her off at an early age to Eurymedon of Myrrhinus, whose greatest achievement was to father Speusippus, the nephew who would follow Plato at the head of the Academy.

Early Years and Socrates

The young Plato excelled in his studies, including in gymnastics; according to Aristotle’s student Dicæarchus, he was a well-known wrestler and competed at the Isthmian Games. It is said that Plato started out as a poet and tragedian, but burnt his works after meeting Socrates. Probably, it is Critias who introduced him to Socrates, who must have seemed like a breath of fresh air after his eccentric tutor, the Heraclitean Cratylus.

Socrates too would have been delighted to meet Plato: it is said that, the night before their first meeting, he dreamt of a cygnet on his knees, which at once sprouted feathers and flew up uttering a loud sweet note.

Socrates too would have been delighted to meet Plato: it is said that, the night before their first meeting, he dreamt of a cygnet on his knees, which at once sprouted feathers and flew up uttering a loud sweet note.

Plato frequented Socrates for, or over, several years. Had Athens been at peace, he might have spent all his days basking in his sunlight. He must have despaired of army life, which he likely looked upon as a rite of passage for a political career.

With the coming of the Thirty Tyrants (following Athens’ defeat by Sparta), Plato may have hoped for a new age of rational government by philosophical men such as Critias and Charmides who embodied the sound values of his aristocratic class. But when, in 404, Critias invited him to join their administration, he held back, repelled by its oppression and, more particularly, its attempt to implicate Socrates in the execution of the innocent Leon of Salamis.

Mercifully, the regime only held out for a matter of months before being routed by the democratic forces in exile, with both Critias and Charmides killed in the heat of battle. If the initial restraint and moderation of the restored democracy did fill Plato with renewed hope, the trial and execution of Socrates would have put paid to any remaining illusions that he might have entertained about Athenian politics.

Travels

After the fall of the Thirty Tyrants, Plato’s name turned from a major asset into a major liability, and his background, politics, and association with Socrates all sat uncomfortably with the mood of the times. In consequence, he retired with other Socratics to Megara in West Attica, where he resided with Euclid, a Socratic and Eleatic who had been present at the death of Socrates.

Euclid, under the influence of the Eleatics, argued in the manner of Zeno, lending force to his ideas by disproving or discrediting those of his opponents. Socrates thought poorly of such eristics and, in his living, had encouraged him to prefer the more cordial and constructive dialectic method. Despite Euclid’s antagonistic debating style, Plato, Euclid, and the other Socratics must have had many fertile conversations in Megara. By marrying the ideas of Parmenides and Socrates, Euclid would go on to establish the Megarian school of philosophy.

According to Diogenes Laertius, after a time in Megara, Plato crossed to Cyrene, the Libyan birthplace of both Aristippus and the geometer Theodorus. As he had a higher opinion of Theodorus than of Aristippus, he probably stayed with the former, who features as a friend and contemporary of Socrates in three of his later dialogues, the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman.

From Cyrene, Plato may have proceeded to Egypt, before, perhaps, being recalled to Greece to serve in a fresh anti-Spartan alliance.

Travels in Italy

If Plato did get embroiled in the so-called Corinthian War, he may have returned to Athens after the Battle of Coroneia in 394 BCE. Now in his mid-thirties, he no doubt received several marriage proposals, which he turned down in favour of philosophy. He may have started on his dialogues as early as Megara or Cyrene, but now he doubled down. By the time he left for Italy in around 388, he had already written several works, including the Apology, Laches, and Protagoras.

In Taras [modern-day Taranto] on the heel of Italy Plato visited the foremost Pythagorean philosopher Archytas, with whom he may have discussed the problem of doubling the cube, or so-called Delian problem.

According to Plutarch, the forever feuding Delians had turned in despair to the Delphic oracle, who advised them to double the size of their altar to Apollo. In obeisance to the oracle, they built another altar with sides twice as long—but, if anything, their problems only got worse.

When the Delians wrote to Plato for advice, he replied that the oracle may have meant doubling the volume of the cube, rather than simply doubling the length of its sides—in which case their new altar was four times too large. But since no one knew how to calculate the length of side required to double the volume of a cube, the god may in fact have been telling them to moderate their passions by taking up the study of mathematics and philosophy.

In Taras, Archytas is likely to have introduced Plato to his teacher Eurytus, who had himself been a pupil of Philolaus. Like Philolaus, Eurytus believed that numbers give limit to the limitless and form to matter, and that their odd and even values account for opposites such as rest and motion, light and dark, and one and many. The concept is not dissimilar to modern binary code.

Plato was deeply impressed by Archytas and the Pythagoreans, whose influence is evident in middle works such as the Meno and Phaedo. In Taras, Plato may also have met Timaeus, if there did exist a historical Timaeus. If not, he might have calqued the Timaeus of the Timaeus on Archytas and other Pythagoreans.

First Trip to Syracuse

At the invitation of a philosopher called Dion, Plato left Taras for the court of Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily.

Dion’s father Hipparinus had been instrumental to the rise of Dionysius, first to supreme military commander and then to tyrant. Dionysius had in turn married Hipparinus’ daughter Aristomache, making Dion his brother-in-law and, later, his adviser and close confidant.

Although taken by Dion, Plato had grave reservations about the dissolute Dionysius, who had made himself tyrant by staging an attack upon his own life and using the attack as a pretext to set up a ‘guard’—really, a private army. But Rome had recently been sacked by the Gauls and Plato may have been running out of places to go.

Dionysius sought to surround himself with lettered men to flatter his artistic pretensions and lend himself the aura of an enlightened despot. But he also had a predilection for turning upon them, so that when the dithyrambic poet Philoxenus declined to praise his verses, he condemned him to hard labour in the quarries. 

Plato’s criticisms of the sybaritic court of Syracuse angered Dionysius. Plato had argued, among others, that a slave with a just and ordered soul is happier than an unjust tyrant. To test this theory, Dionysius sold Plato into slavery!

According to Diogenes Laertius, the Cyrenaic philosopher Anniceris ransomed Plato from Dionysius for twenty minas. 

Upon returning safe and sound to Athens, Plato resolved to remain there once and for all.

The Academy

In 387, the King’s Peace, negotiated by all belligerents and underwritten by the Persian king Artaxerxes II, brought the eight-year-long Corinthian War to an end. Hoping that the Peace would last, Plato purchased a large house some six stadia (around half a mile) beyond the north-western Dipylon gate. The house gave onto the precinct of the Akademeia, named after the Attic hero Hekademos.

The Akademeia contained a sacred grove of olive trees that produced the oil for the victors at the Panathenaic Games. Hippias, the son of Peisistratos, had walled the garden and raised statues and temples. Cimon, the son of Miltiades, had diverted the Cephalus river for irrigation and planted large trees including oriental planes, poplars, and elms. By the time Plato arrived, a gymnasium had been added to one corner. Several athletic and religious events took place or ended within the garden, including the Dionysiac procession from Athens and the torch-lit night race to the altar of Prometheus.

Plato applied for the permission to establish a school—on paper, a thiasos, or religious confraternity. In a nod to the Pythagoreans, he inscribed on the lintel above the door, ‘Let none but geometers enter here.’ Scholars and students took up residence in neighbouring houses, and those of meagre means lodged with others or further out. When he arrived, Eudoxus of Cnidus could only afford an apartment in Piræus, and, each day, walked the seven miles in each direction. Later, his friends and colleagues raised the funds to send him to Heliopolis in Egypt to pursue his study of astronomy and mathematics.

Gatherings often took place in the garden or gymnasium. In many European languages, secondary schools that prepare students for higher education are still, for this reason, called gymnasia. Although Plato privileged the dialectic method, he also encouraged senior members to deliver the occasional public lecture. The Academy’s public lectures became popular, and, after some years, Plato obtained permission to construct a small amphitheatre in which to accommodate them. Plato himself once delivered a lecture entitled, ‘On the Good’, and it may have been the desire to speak to a lay audience that led him to invent striking metaphors such as the sun, line, and cave.

In his forty years as scholarch [head] of the Academy, Plato must have seen through hundreds of students, not least Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates of Chalcedon, Heraclides of Pontus, Hestiæus of Perinthus, and Philip of Opus.

Among all the men, he is known to have admitted at least two women, Axiothea of Phlius and Lastheneia of Mantinea—who were nevertheless required to dress like men so as not be mistaken for hetairai [courtesans].

Second Trip to Syracuse

In 367, twenty years after the foundation of the Academy, the tyrant of Syracuse Dionysius I competed with a play, The Ransom of Hector, which won first prize at the Lenaia festival. Dionysius celebrated by drinking himself to death.

Although Dionysius had married Dion’s sister Aristomache, he had also married Doris of Locri, and while Aristomache bore him four children it was Doris who produced his heir apparent, also called Dionysius. As the older Dionysius lay on his deathbed, Dion tried to talk him into anointing an heir born of Aristomache, who, unlike Doris, was Syracusan and popular with the people. Hearing of this, the younger Dionysius had his father poisoned by way of his doctors.

The paranoid Dionysius had kept his son and heir confined and uneducated, and Dion felt that education might transform Dionysius the Younger if not into a philosopher-king, then at least into a half decent ruler. On this pretext, Dionysius and the Pythagoreans persuaded Plato to return to Syracuse.

Plato did not have high hopes for Dionysius but felt bound to Dion and reluctant to pass over even the slimmest chance of putting theory into practice. When Plato’s trireme docked into Syracuse, Dionysius sacrificed to the gods. But Plato’s arrival, and his grip on Dionysius, did not please the tyrant’s jealous advisors, who accused Dion of plotting against their man.

As his advisors dripped poison into his ear, Dionysius grew suspicious of the able, experienced, and popular Dion, who behaved or acted as ruler in all but name. In 366, Dionysius walked Dion down to the beach and bundled him into a boat bound for Italy. To prevent Plato from protesting or leaving, he removed him to the citadel and placed him under a ‘guard of honour’. In time, Plato cajoled him into letting him go.

Third Trip to Syracuse

When Plato returned to the Academy, he found a new face in the teenage Aristotle, a man, at last, with real and lasting power. Making the most of exile, Dion soon re-joined them in Athens.

Dionysius did everything in his power to persuade Plato to return to Syracuse, even bargaining with the fates of Dion and his wife. In 361, Plato sailed to Syracuse for a third and last time.

Unsurprisingly, the trip did not go well. When Plato kept on advocating for Dion, Dionysius banished him to the barracks to live amid his hostile guards. Plato would have been reminded of Socrates, of his experience with Alcibiades and Charmides, and of his conviction that virtue cannot be taught.

Fortunately, Dionysius soon returned Plato to the palace. And after a time, Plato once again coaxed the tyrant into letting him leave—promising himself, this time, never to return. Later, Dionysius sent a letter to Athens in which he expressed the fear that Plato would complain about him to the other philosophers at the Academy. Plato curtly replied that he would never be at such a loss of subjects to discuss as to seek one in him.

When Dionysius sold Dion’s estate and forced his wife Arete to marry another, Dion led a revolt, ousting the tyrant and confining him to the citadel. Dion ruled chaotically for three years before being assassinated by Calippus, a close friend and student of Plato who had been bribed by Dionysius.

Although Dion had once been popular with the Syracusans, his failure as tyrant to pursue democratic reforms led them to turn against him—demonstrating the difficulties in setting up anything approaching Plato’s Republican ideal. The same could be said of the broader Syracusan adventure: Dionysius I had loved the arts, Dionysius II Plato, Dion wisdom… and yet.

Final Years

When Dion died in 354, Plato was in his seventies. He was still writing, now faster than ever, and had also developed a set of more mystical unwritten teachings [ágrapha dógmata]. Although predisposed to the highest abstraction, he was keen to show the practical significance of all his theorizing, which he did in his last and longest work, the Laws, which remained unpublished at the time of his death in 348.

See my related article, The Life of Aristotle.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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Shutterstock/Amnat Phuthamrong

The Stoic revival has picked up pace in recent years, with people looking for something more substantial than the material hedonism that has come to fill the space vacated by the retreat of organised religion. Indeed, although more expressly rational, Stoicism has been compared to Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, for being based on fluids concepts and flexible principles rather than blind faith and rigid dogma. But the similarities do not end there.

Desire and Attachment

According to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the cause of all suffering is desire, and the natural way to eliminate this suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. The first division of the Noble Eightfold Path is “right view”, or maintaining perspective on reality.

Similarly, the Stoics taught that we ought at every moment to be rational. Unfortunately, we are too readily waylaid from reason by unwise attachments and the destructive emotions to which they give rise. These attachments dangle the promise of pleasure or happiness but really offer only slavery—whereas, if only we could see it, nothing leads to pleasure and happiness as surely as reason and self-control.

In the words of Marcus Aurelius, which are all the more remarkable for coming from an emperor:

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river… Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.

God, Fate and Evil

Stoic physics is indebted to Plato’s Timaeus, in which the philosopher Timaeus claims that God’s creation is itself a god. Human souls, being fashioned from the inferior residue of the world soul, are aligned with the will of God. But once implanted into a body, they are overwhelmed by sensations and affections, which they can only overcome through appropriate nurture and education.

Like Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, Stoicism rejects a separate divine sphere, arguing instead that God is infused in all things, including in us, who therefore share in His nature. We are, as Epictetus often reminds us, a part or extension of God:

In conversation, exercise, discourse—do you remember that it is God you are feeding, God you are exercising? You carry God around with you and don’t know it, poor fool.

The Stoics were essentially pantheists, like Baruch Spinoza, who thought of God and creation as one and the same thing. And like that other great 17th century philosopher, GW Leibniz, they believed that the universe is a rationally ordered whole, and that everything that happens within it, if only we could see it, happens for the best of possible reasons.

Hence, our fate has already been determined: instead of rebelling against it, we should be content to play the role that has been assigned to us. We are, said Zeno [the founder of Stoicism], like a dog tethered to a cart: the wise person runs smoothly alongside, whereas the fool struggles and strains but is dragged along anyway.

This echoes the Hindu concept of dharma, which can be translated, loosely, as “duty”. When Krishna addresses Prince Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he is not persuading him to fight so much as telling him that he is going to have to fight regardless:

Fettered by your own task, which springs from your nature, you will inevitably do what you in your folly do not want to do.

Chrysippus, who succeeded Zeno and Cleanthes at the head of the Stoa, argued that evil is the inevitable consequence of nature’s goodness. For instance, many of the bones in the human skull are light and thin, improving it overall but by the same token leaving it vulnerable to blows. Evil presents us, as it did the hero Hercules, with opportunities to test and hone ourselves—and also a motive, for what would it mean to be good in a world without evil?

In Samkyha-Yoga, the world was created to purify souls by providing them with experience, and, in time, with liberation. To put this more poetically, the world was created to show consciousness to itself. The doctrines of karma and moksha[liberation] could not hold in a world without evil.

Salvation, for the Stoic as for the Hindu, is to embrace life to the point of accepting fate, and so to become as one with the world. In Indian terms, it is to achieve moksha, that is, liberation from maya [illusion], dukkha [suffering], and samsara [the cycle of death and rebirth].

In the Encheiridion, the Stoic Epictetus compares life to a landfall during a much longer sea voyage back to our homeland, and warns us not to get so caught up by the fruits and flowers as to forget about the ship.

Cosmopolitanism

Philosophers debate whether karma theory is a firm basis for morality, or just an appeal to naked self-interest.

One way around this problem is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions, so that the system becomes impossible to game. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome. For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.

The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others so that helping others is the same as helping oneself. The Stoics, too, believed that all human beings form part of a single organism. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we too each have a role to play in society, even if it is only to serve as a warning to others. “Remember” says Seneca, “that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.”

To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.

Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories and Indian Mythology and Philosophy.

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Plato’s Forms are at the root of Western psychology, philosophy, and theology.

In the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche calls Plato ‘the sincerest advocate of the beyond, the great slanderer of life.’

The dichotomy between truth and appearance, and the devaluation of appearance, is rooted in pre-Socratic philosophy. Just as Plato leant upon Heraclitus’ flux for his conception of the sensible world of appearance (the world as we see it), so he leant upon Parmenides’ unity for his conception of the intelligible world (the world when we think it), which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the Forms.

The Genesis of the Forms

Plato’s authorship spanned some fifty years, from the death of Socrates in 399 BCE to his own death in c. 348. He is traditionally ascribed with 35 dialogues, although around ten of these are or may be spurious. Today, the dialogues are often classified into three periods, ‘early’, ‘middle’, and ‘late’, based on their presumed order of composition.

The early dialogues are relatively short and accessible. They are sometimes referred to as the Socratic dialogues because they set forth more of the historical Socrates, typically debating ethical subjects such as temperance, courage, or friendship with youths, friends, or a supposed expert.

From these beginnings, Plato gradually developed distinct philosophical ideas, such as his Theory of Forms, which features in middle dialogues such as the Phaedo, Symposium, and Republic. In these long, literary dialogues, the character Socrates is less of the historical Socrates and more of a mouthpiece for Plato. He is accordingly more didactic, putting forth positive doctrines and no longer content merely to question and refute. Other middle dialogue doctrines that are unlikely to owe to Socrates include the Theory of Recollection, the Theory of Reincarnation, and the Theory of the Tripartite Soul—which are each connected to the Forms.

The FORMS IN THE Phaedo

The Phaedo is named for the young Phaedo of Ellis, whom Socrates had rescued from slavery. For the first time, Plato explicitly appeals to the Forms, although does not do much to explain them. He also assumes reader familiarity with the Meno and the Theory of Recollection, which the Phaedo builds upon.

In the Phaedo, which used to be called On the Soul, Socrates offers four arguments for the immortality of the soul, among which the Theory of Recollection and the Theory of Forms. The supposed immortality of the soul enables Socrates to remain sanguine in the face of his pending execution, and offers the ultimate justification for the life of virtue. The dialogue ends with a myth of the afterlife and, of course, the dramatic drinking of the hemlock.

Socrates argues that that which is compounded is dissoluble, but that which is uncompounded is indissoluble and therefore unchanging. The Forms (for instance, Beauty), which are unchanging, are uncompounded, but their particulars (for instance, a beautiful horse), which are in a constant state of composition and degradation, are compounded. Particulars are apprehended by the senses, but the Forms can only be apprehended by the mind. Since the soul cannot be apprehended by the senses, it must be immortal.

The embodied soul employs the body as an instrument of perception, but what the body perceives is in a perpetual state of flux, so that the soul is thrown into confusion. But when the soul is once again detached from the body, or when it turns inward to contemplate itself, it passes into the realm of the unchanging and approaches wisdom.

Upon death, not all souls suffer the same fate. The soul of the philosopher, being the most detached from the body, is able to reach the realm of the unchanging, where it ‘lives in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills…’ But unphilosophical souls, which have been weighed down by worldly cares and bodily desires, remain earthbound and pass into another body.

Socrates affirms that the Theory of Forms is the most plausible theory of the deep causes of things. On this account, something is beautiful because it participates in the Form of Beauty, two is two because it participates in the Form of Duality, and so on. A thing that participates in a Form also participates in other closely connected Forms. For instance, three bundled pencils participate in the Form of Oddness as well as the Form of Threeness. However, opposite Forms such as Even and Odd cannot admit of each other. Whenever a soul is embodied, there is invariably life, indicating that the soul is closely connected with life, and thus that it cannot admit of its opposite, death.

The Symposium: Love as the engine of wisdom

In the Symposium, Socrates relates the time when the priestess Diotima taught him 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 transcended the physical, he gradually finds that beautiful practices and customs and the various branches 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.

The Republic: The Form of the Good

In Book 5 of the Republic, in discussing the ideal state and the education of its guardians, Plato introduces the elusive Form of the Good. It is by attaining the Form of the Good that the philosopher-king is made fit to rule. As the Form of the Good is impossible to describe, and difficult to imagine, Socrates tries to convey its essence through three interconnected metaphors: the famous sun, line, and cave, which I discuss in a separate article.

LEGACY of the Forms

In the Phaedo, the Theory of Forms is presented as ‘the most plausible theory’, without any backing or questioning. In later dialogues, Plato becomes more doubtful—and in the Parmenides, has Parmenides demolish his pet Theory of Forms.

Arresting though it may be, the Theory of Forms is never definitive, and features less prominently in the late dialogues. Part of the pleasure and privilege, and seduction, of reading Plato is that he is thinking with us, rather than simply telling us what he thinks, or what to think.

In any case, our main interest in the Theory of Forms is not in its logic or coherence, but in its impact and influence. The Phaedo entrenched most of the divisions or dualities that mark the Western mind, including soul and body, mind and matter, reason and sense experience, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, good and evil, heaven and hell… In the Western tradition, since the Phaedo, the body is the source of all evil. But in the Eastern tradition, for instance, in yoga, we can take control of the mind through the body.

Although the Phaedo is at the root of Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, it is also deeply Eastern in advocating supreme detachment and ego suppression or disintegration as the route to salvation. Also, death is an illusion … we will be reincarnated … according to our deeds (karma). These, however, are not the aspects that the West has retained.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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When Plato first appeals to the Forms (or Theory of Forms)  at the end of Book 5 of the Republic, he assumes that the reader is already familiar with the concept, perhaps from earlier works such as the Phaedo and Phaedrus.

But now, in discussing the education of the guardians, Plato introduces the elusive Form of the Good [hē toû agathoû idea]. It is by attaining the Form of the Good that the philosopher-king is made fit to rule.

As the Form of the Good is impossible to describe, and difficult to imagine, Socrates tries to convey its essence through three connected metaphors: the sun, line, and cave.

1. The Metaphor of the Sun

  • Just as it is by the light of the sun that the visible is made apparent to the eye, so it is by the light of truth and being – in contrast to the twilight of becoming and perishing – that the nature of reality is made apprehensible to the soul.
  • Just as light and sight may be said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the sun, so science and truth may be said to be like the Good, and yet not to be the Good; it is by the sun that there is light and sight, and it is by the Good that there is science and truth.
  • Just as the sun is the author of nourishment and generation, so the Good is the author of being and essence. Thus, the Good is beyond being, and the cause of all existence.

2. The Metaphor of the Line

A line is cut into two unequal parts, and each of them is divided again in the same proportion. The two main divisions correspond to the intelligible world and to the visible world. One section in the visible division consists of images, that is,
shadows and reflections, and is accessed through imagination. The other, higher section in the visible division consists of sensible particulars and is accessed through belief. One section in the intelligible division consists of Forms and is accessed through thought, but via sensible particulars and hypotheses, as when geometers use a picture of a triangle to help reason about triangularity, or make appeal to axioms to prove theorems. The other, higher section in the intelligible division also consists of Forms but is accessed by understanding, a purely abstract science which requires neither sensible particulars nor hypotheses, but only an unhypothetical first principle, namely, the Form of the Good. The purpose of education is to move the philosopher through the various sections of the line until he reaches the Form of the Good.

3. The Metaphor or Allegory of the Cave

Human beings have spent all their lives in an underground cave or den which has a mouth open towards the light. They have their legs and their necks chained so that they cannot move, and can see only in front of them, towards the back of the cave. Above and behind them a fire is blazing, and between them and the fire there is a raised way along which there is a low wall. Men pass along the wall carrying all sorts of statues, and the fire throws the shadows of these statues onto the back of the cave. All the prisoners ever see are the shadows, and so they suppose that the shadows are the objects themselves.

Plato's cave meaning
Picture © Neel Burton

If a prisoner is unshackled and turned towards the light, he suffers sharp pains, but in time he begins to see the statues and moves from the cognitive stage of imagination to that of belief. The prisoner is then dragged out of the cave, where the light is so bright that he can only look at the shadows, and then at the reflections, and then finally at the objects themselves: not statues this time, but real objects. In time, he looks up at the sun, and understands that the sun is the cause of everything that he sees around him, of light, of vision, and of the objects of vision. In so doing, he passes from the cognitive stage of thought to that of understanding.

The purpose of education is to drag the prisoner as far out of the cave as possible; not to instil knowledge into his soul, but to turn his whole soul towards the sun, which is the Form of the Good. Once out of the cave, the prisoner is reluctant to descend back into the cave and get involved in human affairs. When he does, his vision is no longer accustomed to the dark, and he appears ridiculous to his fellow men. However, he must be made to descend back into the cave and partake of human labours and honours, whether they are worth having or not. This is because the State aims not at the happiness of a single person or single class, but at the happiness of all its citizens. In any case, the prisoner has a duty to give service to the State, since it is by the State that he was educated to see the light of the sun.

The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst… You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life… And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other?

The Form of the Good seems to be the source of all existence and knowledge, and yet to lie beyond them. Looking beyond the West, it seems to me that the Form of the Good is very similar to the Hindu concept of Brahman.

Now read my related article: Plato’s Theory of the Forms Explained

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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The premise of Plato’s Symposium [Banquet] is that each of the guests at the banquet is to deliver a speech in praise of love. Aristophanes, however, chooses to deliver his speech in the form of a myth about the origins of love. This is the famous Myth of Aristophanes, which appears to lean upon elements of the cosmogony of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. The significance of the Myth of Aristophanes is that it contributed to the development of the modern, romantic notion of love as existential and redeeming.

The Myth

In the beginning, there were three kinds of people: male, descended from the sun; female, descended from the earth; and hermaphrodite, with both male and female parts, descended from the moon.

These early people were completely round, each with four arms and four legs, two identical faces on opposite sides of a head with four ears, and all else to match. They walked both forward and backward and ran by turning cartwheels on their eight limbs, moving in circles like their parents the planets.

Because they were wild and unruly and threatening to scale the heavens, Zeus, the father of the gods, cut each one down the middle ‘like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling’—and even threatened to do the same again so that they might hop on one leg.

Picture © Neel Burton

Apollo, the god of light and enlightenment, then turned their heads to make them face towards their wound, pulled their skin around to cover up the wound, and tied it together at the navel like a purse. He made sure to leave a few wrinkles on what became known as the abdomen so that they might be reminded of their punishment.

After that, people searched all over for their other half. When they finally found it, they wrapped themselves around it so tightly and unremittingly that they began to die from hunger and neglect. Taking pity on them, Zeus moved their genitals to the front so that those who were previously androgynous could procreate, and those who were previously male could obtain satisfaction and move on to higher things.

This is the origin of our desire for others: those of us who desire members of the opposite sex used to be hermaphrodites, whereas men who desire men used to be male, and women who desire women used to be female.

When we find our other half, we are ‘lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy’ that cannot be accounted for by mere lust, but by the need to be whole again, to be restored to our original nature. Our greatest wish, if we could only have it, would then be for Hephæstus, the god of fire, to melt us into one another so that our souls could be at one and share in a common fate.

Now read my related article: Plato’s Theory of the Forms Explained

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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