Plato, what is he good for?

Razib,

Plato is "everything."

His concept of reality -- the REAL reality -- may be abstract, and without mathematical exegesis, but it as close to quantum reality as anything else.

Moreover, Plato's "philosophy" is existential (like Socrate's was) but also humanistic, like Fromm's.

To eschew Plato is to eschew the basis of almost everything scientific, political, and philosophic that is rife today.

Tell your younger brother to get tons of Plato under his belt; it will serve him well in future.

RR

Rich,

Exactly how does the idea of a higher reality of perfect, eternal forms have anything at all to do with "quantum reality"? I don't think you really understand quantum theory, but rather subscribe to a new-age, gross misunderstanding of it. Trying to reconcile a 2000+ year old theory with modern scientific understanding is tortuous at best.

I am also not too keen on the idea that pure reason (sans evidence) is the cure all for any problem posed. This also led to the idea that undesirables should not be allowed to reproduce. The Republic might have been progressive in its day, but that was over 2000 years ago.

I agree with Razib; Plato is interesting, but only as a part of the historical narrative.

Well, you might have him pick up Bloom's translation of the Republic, which has a pretty long interpretive essay attached.

That's a pretty strong pro-Plato case. And he can also read Russell's fairly short dismissal of Plato in his history of philosophy.

And then he can make a reasonably informed decision on whether of not to spend a lot of time reading Plato.

I agree with Razib; Plato is interesting, but only as a part of the historical narrative.

let me be clear here: i do not think the historical narrative is a triviality. i do value it, though it is pearl of somewhat less price than science in my eye. that being said, a basic knowledge of the republic is to me rather like a basic knowledge of the bible. if you're an educated person you just have to know it, your personal opinion as to its validity isn't particularly relevant.

There is a lot to be learned from Plato. For example, if you are losing an argument, start talking about horse training. Works every time.

I think Plato is used in most first year survey courses to show not only the history of ideas but also the spirit of philosophy. The ideas on their own are stale in our time but a good professor will have amusing stories to tell about the characters, the intellectual setting, interpretive lessons (e.g. socrates in plato vs the historical socrates, early vs later plato), etc.

Someone new to philosophy could pick up a primary text but a lot of the context is missing. I think summary and comparison are more interesting to a beginner, not only because it's more efficient use of time but also what most of us are really interested in is tracing the ideas as they develop in a historical context without getting too bogged down in either a fetish for fidelity of obviously wrong ideas, or the anachronism entailed in critically examining an old text.

Russ (et al.)

My point about Plato's real reality was that there are realities that we don't see, and which are, as he intuited,
the true reality.

Plato's "eternal forms" could be strings, or things more elaborate, such as Dark Matter.

At any rate, he, like no other philosopher of his time or since, posited ideas that took into account realities (or The reality) that were imperceptible, and gave them credibility of a kind.

As for The Republic's view about "reproduction being restricted" -- the idea, without the Nazi overlay, is interesting, and actually practiced by some who use in vitro impregnation and select "special donors" for the service.

Plato was ahead of his time, and ours also it seems.

RR

if you're an educated person you just have to know it

But that's just the point: no, no we don't.

But that's just the point: no, no we don't.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that if you want to have any sense of where Western Philosophy, up to and including modern humanistic liberalism, comes from, you'd do well to know something of the fountain whence it sprang. You can choose to be ignorant of it, but the same is true of science, mathematics, literature, NASCAR, etc. It isn't true at the same time that you can be free of the effects of your ignorance.

The history of ideas matters- how much, one can argue. But the fact that someone educated in science is, by this very fact, completely marinated in a philosophical tradition stretching back to the ancient Greeks, makes a willful, petulant ignorance of the tradition a form of self-sodomy: fun for others to watch, but still, a bad idea.

Razib,

I did not mean to imply that it was a triviality. In that sentence I did state that Plato is interesting after all. I do sincerely believe we can learn a lot by examining how ideas built upon each other through the ages.

But, we do have to remember that we have come a long way since then. Many of the ideas that Plato postulated simply do not work, and trying to fit them into modern discourse is like trying to fit ether theory back into physics.

Rich, I see where you're coming from, but I think we have to be careful when we reinterpret older ideas in a modern context. All to often people superimpose their modern ideas onto those in the past, crediting them with insights they never had, nor could have had.

What strikes me in reading Plato (and to a lesser extent Aristotle) is the extraordinary badness of some of the arguments they used (fallacies of equivocation, etc). This may be partly a problem of translation, but that can hardly be the whole explanation. As Plato and Aristotle were not stupid, it is a salutary lesson that rational thinking is really difficult.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that if you want to have any sense of where Western Philosophy, up to and including modern humanistic liberalism, comes from, you'd do well to know something of the fountain whence it sprang.

Obviously if I want to know how the tradition originated I need to know how it originated. That's trivally tautological!

The point is that we don't need to know how it originated. And even if we do, that knowledge isn't useful.

What strikes me in reading Plato (and to a lesser extent Aristotle) is the extraordinary badness of some of the arguments they used (fallacies of equivocation, etc). This may be partly a problem of translation, but that can hardly be the whole explanation.

Yes, it can be quite cringe-worthy watching Plato wrestling with the different possible senses of the word "is", but bear in mind that these guys were essentially pioneers in the field of dealing with conceptual problems in a systematic way. The flaws in their reasoning are evident in hindsight, but the reason it's evident is that our understanding of those problems derives in large measure from their efforts.

Plato is a very big deal mostly because he was the first or pioneering 'humanist' a the rigorous sense of the word and just by being 'Western' you already 'know' a lot about his thought, though maybe not what.

Plato is the first, or one of the first, of the humanists, in a rigorous sense of the word and actually knew what a 'humanist' was. He puts Socrates out there discussing the meaning of a 'good' or well lived life with various Athenians and seeing if the answers he gets from them, traditional Athenian notions of friendship..., are reasonable. What he really is doing is trying to figure out whether Athenian traditions are 'good' for men in general, or what 'a good life' is like, independent of where one grew up, or what a 'man' and a 'good human life' is like stripped of a particular cultural backround.

His stuff about math is the same. Plato is very big on doing geometry without physical representations or diagrams, that one 'sees' or has an experience of. Given that all sense experiences are 'experiences', geometry per Plato is something a human knows because he's a human, without the benefit of experience, by nature, not nurture. That 'Greek' mathematics isn't really 'Greek' but 'human',or just 'mathematics', or scientific knowledge isn't culturally specific, is very much Plato's doing, there is no such thing as 'Polish' or 'Italian' math or science, and completely rejecting Plato means that one thinks like Nietzche and Heidegger and the Nazi's who really thought there was such a thing a 'Jewish physics' and 'Aryan physics' and the two could be different, which was the usual way of thinking about it, pre Plato.

When some physicist who's into SETI says that some would be alien race's 'laws of physics' have to be something like ours or their logical equivalent, he's echoing Plato even if he doesn't realize it.

I think holding Plato or Aristotle's feet to the fire for making bad arguements about 'is' isn't really fair to them apart from the pioneer part. Bertrand Russell could be quite ridiculous about 'is' or 'exists' or 'existence' without the benefit of being a pioneer.

well some of the statements above are clearly not charitable and seem to me an ego syntonic misreading of the dialectic

(not referring to the person immediately above me, typed that out before it showed up)

The Symposium was an interesting read, sexual love as the desire for 'immortality', shades of the 'immortal gene'. Well, not really, but like RR's fanciful discussion of Plato's supposed grasp of 'quantum reality' or strings as 'eternal forms', it's an interesting intellectual exercise after the event, nothing more.

"completely rejecting Plato means that one thinks like Nietzche and Heidegger and the Nazi's who really thought there was such a thing a 'Jewish physics' and 'Aryan physics' and the two could be different, which was the usual way of thinking about it, pre Plato."

Who exactly are you talking about 'pre-Plato'? The pre-socratics? Pythagoras? And Nietzsche shouldn't be lumped with Heidegger or the Nazi's. #

Aristotle trumps Plato, easier to understand, and his talk of virtue and the pursuit of excellence would be more inspiring to any young man trying to anchor his place in the world, certainly set alongside Plato's dreary polemics.

Persons,

I have a degree in beginners' Plato from a major public university, of which, at the time of my sentence, the department's head philosophizer was a Plato specialist whose tone rang subtly but surely throughout. I am a reticent kind of entity when it comes to public fora, but in the case of this here topic I feel I might know something of use to this thread. Humbly, I would like everyone to know that I am versed in key areas of western jurisprudence, I use arithmetic in my daily course, and I have already written like a million or so books on philosophy. I am also blessed with the latent physical strength of a thousand berserk norsemen, which I have also employed with much success in the education of my younger brother.

As a somewhat informed non-Platoist, I am tickled the phrasing of Razib's topic in the form of a rhetorical question. At this time it is my opinion that the most poignant contemporary summary anyone can find on this subject can be found on this thread, particularly in the window of July 2, 2007, from 4:07 pm to 8:01 pm. Woe will surely befall the civilization that misses this discussion. I believe the word 'fetish' is the kicker.

As a top-notch American I must concur that, in our contemporary 'Judeo-Christian' West, if an individual chooses to become a Platonic 'practitioner,' it will reap benefits if for no other reason than harmonics. To understand the cultural and intellectual precipitations of the Enlightenment, it will be essential, ironically, to know Plato. Whether this is an auspicious state of affairs for a still-emerging (declining?) West, or science in particular, is another question. That's what I'd be sure to disclaim before introducing the likes of Plato on my sweet brother.

Unfortunately there are two indispensable 'pearls' related to modern science that disallows us from jettisoning Plato altogether. The allegory of the Cave, and of course the political paradigms discussed in the Republic. The idea of the 'a priori' rooted in the Cave is an indispensable component of hypothesis, as well as a useful (albeit easily abused) allegory for the 'universe of representation' concepts in computer science and political power analysis of western postmodernism. Unfortunately in institutional practice, this is not generally where Platonic discourse stops, particularly when we find ourselves locked into a 'core curriculum,' or as it turns out, locked into the mechanizations of a four-year political term. If you are autonomous enough to get out of Plato only what you need, the study of Plato in the West will largely be the historical study of hypertrophy, or 'fetish' as the gentleman above described. (I am aware that I have just made an assumption about that person's gender; I'm betting she's too intelligent to be distracted.)

Furthermore, the 'ouisa' discussion and the derivatives on language and forms, while novel to the West and figuratively similar to the Grand Unification projects of science still afoot today, are not now and never were anything novel in the context of world philosophy. Without taking the time for painstaking annotation, Khan the Younger can spend a day wikipedaling the Dharmic religions to find everything and more related to metaphysical "ether" concepts. To this day undergraduates are tortured with compulsory participation in this discussion, even as there is immense value to be found in Greek philosophy as a whole. As a creditor of modern science, Neither Plato nor Aristotle are any higher on the queue than, say, Yajnavalkya. May Christ bless you if you know instantly who that is.

As alluded to by another gentleman above, the 'Great Man' theory may not be all that accurate but it can be useful for piquing interest and establishing Action-Hero types of benchmarks for youngsters trying to establish a conceptual frame for learning. But, obviously, this does not mean Plato should be such a major figure as he is. Aristarchus, Pythagoras, and a slew of Ionians for example, did much more for what we would today call Western Civilization, but failed to appeal historically to moral justifications of elitism, which of course Plato did do quite well. Overall, my own brother's opinion is that knowing Plato has been a good way to learn Western-style irony, as most of the man's contemporary teachers and exegesists are both unapologetic and comically unaware of their outward charlatanism.

Might I suggest to this blog a very good angle on the issue of Plato, without having to actually read too much Plato, would be to put on your anti-marx polymer clean suit and read "A People's History of Science" by Clifford D. Connor. The author's rabid marxism can get downright awful at times, but if your youngster is like some of these hipster brats these days, his sensitivity to the pernicious influence of class-based indignation should be already well-conditioned. A good rule might be to stand over him and make sure he reads "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson concomitantly, to provide a healthy balance for all the left-wing anthropomorphism. And Razib, since he'll want a supplement, maybe let the kid use your Wikipedia machine for once. These two books should be about all he needs to gain a full understanding of the Plato cult diaspora without having to endure the costs of indoctrination at a traditional institution.

Yes, the correct plural form of 'forum' is as stated. Someone mock me for it.

True props from me to Reynolds for steadfast advocacy.

Re: the nabobs whining about appropriate subject matter: There are more than a few kids up in this hemisphere that are evidently on track to a major historical synthesis, one that attempts to accommodate massive timelines, huge human inertias, barely-comprehensible exabytes of raw ambient data. The ones on this site have put themselves well ahead of the curve just in the past few months, particularly by way of the demonstrated commitment to investigating humanity's metaphysical baggage. That's how the big stuff's always been handled since out of Africa. Or the Indus valley, for sticklers. - Khan, I say time to start filling gaps under your macro, and start courting publishers, if you haven't already.

Platonic thought is thinking of the highest and best, and shows mans position between the earthly and the divine.

It is the means to change from the base into a more pure form, and is relevant to all people, in all ages.

It is not the foundation of western civilization (European), it was banned and reading of Platonic writings held the death penalty.

The writings of Plato are crucial for good human development but, finding a teacher of true platonic thought is not to be found in our universities or with modern Doctors of Philosophy

it is an odd thing for someone to criticize plato, unless he is wholly wise or wholly ignorant. do not take the conclusions he comes up with as absolute truth, rather, he is showing us a way to go about philosophic learning. surely plato was a man and men, all men, are liable to make mistakes. take the christian god, christ, he made mistakes but that doesnt stop him from gaining followers. besides to critisize plato is to critisize socrates, pythagoras, and many other great minds before and after. i mostly agree with plato not on his answers but on his thinking that there are definite standards, rules, laws philosophy. it is just like math you surely would not say that 2+2 is anything other than four. that is a definite answer. same for the way plato thought. philosophy is like math there are true truths and false ones. if plato made mistakes then surely he added wrong. it doesnt mean that it is useless to read plato.

there are many reasons people will sway others from following certian ways of life towards there own. so tell your brother to read plato but skeptically. you sound like you are one of those fellows who thinks there is no truth just opinion or that you are right and every one else is wrong. this may very well be true of you, sir!