Plato: An Introduction

by Paul Friedlander, Hans Meyerhoff (Translator)

Overview

Contents: I. Eidos. II. Demon and Eros. III. Beyond Being. IV. The Academy. V. The Written Work. VI. Socrates in Plato. VII. Irony. VIII. Dialogue. IX. Myth. X. Intuition and Construction. XI. Alethcia. XII. Dialogue and Existence. XIII. Plato's Letters. XIV. Plato as Physicist. XV. Plato as Geographer. XVI. Plato as Jurist. XVII. Plato as City Planner. XVIII. Socrates Enters Rome. Index.

Originally published in 1970.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691618913
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Plato , #1848
Pages:	472
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

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Plato

An Introduction

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By Paul Friedländer, Hans Meyerhoff

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1969 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09812-8

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CHAPTER 1

Eidos

WHEN I was young," Plato writes in his mid-seventies in the manifesto To the Friends and Associates of Dion, "my experience was the same as that of many others. I thought that as soon as I became my own master I would immediately enter into public life. But it so happened that fateful changes occurred in the political situation:

"In the government then existing, hated as it was by many, a revolution took place. The revolution was headed by fifty-one leaders, of whom ... thirty formed the highest political authority with unlimited powers. Of these some were relatives and acquaintances of mine, and they invited me to join their administration as if I were entitled to do so. What I then experienced was not surprising considering my youth; for I imagined that they would administer the state by leading it out of an unjust way of life into a just way, and consequently I paid close attention to see what they would do. What I saw in fact was that these men within a short time caused us to look back upon the former government as a golden age. Above all, they tried to send my aged friend Socrates — whom I would, without scruple, call the most just of men then living — along with others after one of the citizens to take him by force so that he might be put to death, their object being apparently that Socrates, whether he wished to or not, should be made to participate in their political actions; he, however, refused to obey and risked the worst penalties rather than be a participant in their unholy practices. So when I saw these things and others of a similar serious nature, I was revolted and I withdrew from these evils. Not long afterward the power of the Thirty was overthrown together with the whole of the government which then existed. And once again, though less urgently, I was seized with a desire to take part in public affairs. Many deplorable events were still happening in those troubled times, and it was not surprising that, in the course of the revolution, some people took violent revenge on their enemies, although the party returning to power exercised, on the whole, considerable moderation. Yet, as misfortune would have it, certain men of authority summoned our companion Socrates before the law courts, raising against him a most criminal charge, one that Socrates, of all men, least deserved. For the indictment was based on the charge of impiety against the gods of the city; and the judges upheld the indictment and put to death the man who, at the very time when they themselves had the misfortune to be in exile, refused to take part in the criminal arrest of a friend of the exiled party.

"When, therefore, I considered all this, and the type of men who were administering the affairs of the state, and the laws and customs too — the more I considered all this, and the more I advanced in years myself, the more difficult appeared to me the task of managing the affairs of the state rightly. For it was impossible to take action without friends and loyal companions, and these it was not easy to find among my acquaintance, since our city no longer lived according to the custom and principles of our forefathers; yet to acquire other, new friends was impossible without great difficulties. Moreover, the corruption in legislation and customs increased to a surprising degree. Thus it happened that I, who was at first filled with an ardent desire to engage in public affairs, finally became dizzy when I viewed all this and saw everything disintegrating around me. Still, not only did I continue to consider what sort of improvement might be made with regard to these matters and with regard to the government as a whole, but also as regards political action I kept constantly waiting for an opportune moment — until, finally, looking at all the states that now exist, I came to the conclusion that one and all they were badly governed. For the state of their laws is such as to be almost incurable, unless perchance, some action of an astonishing sort coincides with good luck. So I was compelled, praising true philosophy, to declare that she alone enables men to discern what is justice in the state and in the lives of the individuals. The generations of mankind, therefore, would have no cessation from evils until either the class of those who are true and genuine philosophers came to political power or else the men in political power, by some divine dispensation, became true philosophers. This was the conviction I held when I came to Italy and Sicily, at the time of my first arrival."

This is Plato's view in retrospect, as an old man, upon the period of his growth between the ages of eighteen and forty. According to Goethe, nobody can share the peculiar way in which an individual looks back upon his past life; and one would be grateful for additional evidence that might complement Plato's testimony or permit us to look upon this testimony from a different perspective. But, for an understanding of how Plato came to be what he finally was, there remains only this fragment of an autobiography. To be sure, it must stand up against the view of many who have denied the Platonic authorship of the manifesto, and against the skepticism of Nietzsche, who "would give no credit to a history of Plato's life written by himself, as little as to Rousseau's, or to the Vita Nuova of Dante."

The autobiographical testimony runs counter to most of the prevalent conceptions about Plato. He has come to occupy his place in the history of Western philosophy. Under the influence of Parmenides, Herakleitos, and Socrates, he is viewed as having discovered philosophical truths; and later philosophers continued to work on his .problems. "After the systems we have named came the philosophy of Plato, which in most respects followed these thinkers, but which had peculiarities that distinguished it from the philosophy of the Italians" (Pythagoreans) . Creative power can hardly be more narrowed down to the dimension of doctrinal history than it is in this passage by Aristotle (Metaphysics I 6). Indeed, it is he who is primarily responsible for this kind of theoretical construction; though it may be questioned whether Plato, at times, could not see himself in such a perspective, if we take what Socrates, in the Phaedo says about the stages of his own philosophical growth as being somehow autobiographical on Plato's part. We do not know the answer, and there is no hint of it in the letter.

The retrospect of the letter, to be sure, is not complete, as is quite evident from the reference to the term "philosophy" at the end of the passage just cited. Nothing is said about how Plato came to this philosophy. He is conscious of having discovered a metaphysical world, and the true philosophy of which he speaks in the letter is the knowledge of the eternal forms and their true being. But Plato did not set out in quest of this world. He set out in quest of the best state, and on this quest he discovered the world of forms.

How this is meant may be seen more clearly when we consider the historical conditions under which Plato grew up. He was not destined, either by the place and time of his birth or by virtue of the social class to which he belonged, to lead the life of the philosopher in the manner in which for centuries now — and partly through Plato's own influence — a person is born into the mainstream of philosophy in the Western world. "When I entered into philosophy ..." wrote Wilhelm Dilthey in a manner characteristic of a modern philosopher. Plato could not have used such an expression; for the intellectual position of a person born of a noble family in Athens at the beginning of the great war was altogether different.

At a time when the sun of Homer had already risen over the Ionian shores, Attica — a small country of landed proprietors, farmers, and seamen — still slumbered at the dawn of a new era. The waves of science and philosophy rising in Miletus and spreading to the colonial settlements in southern Italy did not touch Athens. While in the colonies minds were busy calculating solar eclipses or drafting maps of the earth or inquiring into the basic structure of the universe, Solon and Peisistratos were building the state of Athens and opening its doors to the rich arts of the East. While in Ionia and Magna Graecia the system of pure being competed with the law of opposites hidden in the eternal flux, and while other thinkers carried further the research into the order and basic stuff of the physical world, Athens founded the state of free citizens, defeated the Persians, and created tragic poetry. To be sure, Anaxagoras came to Athens as the first great representative of the Ionian philosophy of nature and won the statesman Perikles as well as the poet Euripides to his new doctrines. But he was a stranger, and so were the younger "physiologists" who in Athens met with applause, ridicule, or enmity. And soon skeptical conclusions began to appear as a result of the contradictions inherent in these philosophies of nature and of the epistemological inquiries of the older thinkers.

Gorgias and Protagoras, the Sophists, also came to Athens as visitors. The Athenian youth ran after them because they offered a new kind of contest and new weapons in the struggle for power. But while the vendors of these novel products were received with honors, no Athenian citizen would have cared to share their trade. "Would you not be ashamed of yourself to appear as a Sophist before the Hellenes?" Socrates asks a young Athenian rushing out to become a pupil of Protagoras; "Yes, by Zeus, Socrates, to confess the truth, I should be," (Protagoras 312 A). This reply of the young man might have been the confession of every well-bred Athenian.

Aristotle reports, in the same passage where he places the philosophy of his teacher in the history of metaphysical systems, that Plato, when young, had become familiar with the Herakleitean Kratylos and had learned from him the doctrine of eternal flux and the impossibility of true knowledge. Socrates, however, had shown him that ethical concepts contained a common element not found in the world of sensible things, and Plato had called this element an Idea. It would be a misunderstanding of Aristotle if this account, which makes sense only in so far as it points in the direction of his own problems, were to be taken as a historical account of Plato's intellectual growth. If that were the case, it would even be possible to assume that the skeptical period in Plato's life was preceded by a materialistic one. One would have only to take Socrates' description, in the Phaedo, of his own philosophical development as a biographical account applying to Plato. But aside from modern reconstructions of this kind, we do not know in the least how deeply Plato was affected by "philosophical" ideas to which he was exposed through Kratylos and others. And even if this influence did lead him to the point of despairing of all knowledge — which, incidentally, sounds more like the case of Doctor Faustus than that of a man in classical antiquity — there was always practical reality. If he had been able to act, speculative broodings of this kind might have vanished as they did in the case of the young Bismarck, who overcame Byronic world-weariness and Feuerbach's skepticism once he plunged into the world of action.

No, an Athenian citizen tracing his genealogy to Solon would wish, even at the end of the fifth century, only to enter upon a political career. "To become a leading man in the city" — that is the aspiration of every young man, of Alkibiades in Plato's dialogue of the same name, of Plato's brother Glaukon in Xenophon's Memorabilia, of Plato himself, according to the retrospect of the great letter. However, there was one fundamental difference between him and the others: for him this career raised deep personal and intellectual problems leading to the turning point in his life.

The more a person's life is concerned with the quest for the essential, the more likely he is to perceive a symbolic meaning in what is happening before his eyes. Plato saw the disintegration of Athens in the fate of Socrates. If Athens could no longer tolerate its most loyal servant, who was always ready to die for the city and finally did die for its laws, if the aristocratic revolutionaries wanted to involve him in the moral responsibility for their misdeed — involve Socrates, who had always opposed the arbitrary rule of momentary majorities and who had always pleaded for a government of the "best"; if, finally, the democratic restoration condemned this very man who had refused to become a partner of the oligarchy in criminal proceedings against a member of the democratic party — then, Plato felt, the city created and made great by the ancestors had deteriorated to a level of meaningless political drifting.

To be a statesman or politician was not yet a separate profession when Plato considered such a career seriously. For when Aristotle defined man as a "political animal," he expressed conceptually what was tacitly taken for granted in real life. How to win Arete and how to become a statesman were questions facing every young man, and both questions were ultimately one and the same. If he could not become a political man, this did not mean, as it does today, that he would have to choose a different profession: it meant that the essential part of man's existence was denied, since the time of the Stoic Sage or the Christian Saint had not yet come. Thus the impossibility of a political career — symbolized in the fate of Socrates — meant for Plato either the destruction of one's own life or the demand to build a new life on an entirely different foundation for both the individual and the state. And had not Socrates shown how this was to be done? It was no longer a question of patching up old institutions: it was a question of the remaking of man. Without making man "virtuous," it was impossible to conceive of the Arete of the city. Socrates, by constantly asking the question, What is virtue?, had already begun the work of restoration. He alone knew what was necessary: he was the only Athenian practicing the true art of politics. When Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, presented the challenge that philosophers should be rulers or the rulers of the city philosophers, this was not a manifestation of an "excess of philosophical pride," as Jacob Burckhardt called it; it was rather an epigrammatic formulation of a profound insight dawning upon the statesman in Plato as a result of his personal experience at that moment in history and as a result of his encounter with Socrates.

In the last analysis, we cannot but "share with Plato the peculiar way in which he looked back upon his past life." To be sure, this life is too rich to be described by a simple formula, however general. Yet he undoubtedly saw what was the most essential aspect of it, and this is confirmed by his own writings. The Republic and the Laws by far surpass, in size alone, any other work of Plato's. A survey of the total body of his writings must place the Republic in the center of his entire literary production. In fact, it is legitimate to consider most of the earlier dialogues as a preparation directly leading to the Republic. The inner structure of the Republic, in turn, is determined by the thesis that the true rulers and the true philosophers are identical; it contains, at its very center (473CD, 499B), the pointed epigram of the Seventh Letter about the philosopher-kings. Finally, Plato's own life shows repeated attempts to realize this apparent paradox in the political events of his own times. What, then, does the paradox mean? This question may be answered by a brief digression on the nature of the Greek state.

Originally the Greek state is firmly based on a divine or religious foundation. In Homer, it is Zeus who grants scepter and ruling power to the kings. In Hesiod, Themis is the wife of Zeus; both have, besides the Fates, which bring good and evil to mortals, three other daughters, the Horai: their names — Eunomia, Dike, and Eirene — represent the basic principles underlying all human or "political" communities. Even a criminal or a tyrant who violated the law of the state acknowledged its divinity when he used the terms Themis or Dike. Later, when this original stability was subjected to questions and doubts, Herakleitos secured the foundations of the state in the order of the cosmos. Why "should the people fight for the law as for their city wall?" Because the order of the state is part of the larger order of the world. "For all human laws are nourished by one which is divine. It governs as far as it will, and is sufficient for all, and more than sufficient."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Plato by Paul Friedländer, Hans Meyerhoff. Copyright © 1969 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Preface, pg. vii
• Table of Contents, pg. ix
• List of Illustrations, pg. xxiii
• 1. Eidos, pg. 3
• 2. Demon and Eros, pg. 32
• 3. Beyond Being, pg. 59
• 4. The Academy, pg. 85
• 5. The Written Work, pg. 108
• 6. Socrates in Plato, pg. 126
• 7. Irony, pg. 137
• 8. Dialogue, pg. 154
• 9. Myth, pg. 171
• 11. Intuition and Construction, pg. 213
• 11. Aletheia, pg. 221
• 12. Dialogue and Existence, pg. 230
• 13. Plato's Letters, pg. 236
• 14. Plato as Physicist, pg. 246
• 15. Plato as Geographer, pg. 261
• 16. Plato as Jurist, pg. 286
• 17. Plato as City Planner, pg. 314
• 18. Socrates Enters Rome, pg. 323
• NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS, pg. 333
• INDEX, pg. 407
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF PAUL FRIEDLÄNDER, pg. 433
• PAUL FRIEDLÄNDER A NOTE ON HIS LIFE AND WORK, pg. 440