Plato: Life, Philosophy, and the Pursuit of Knowledge
Plato: Life and Work
Plato was born in Athens in 427 BCE. His father, Ariston, traced his lineage back to the king Codrus, and his mother, Perictione, was related to Solon, the first lawgiver of Athens. After his father’s death, his mother remarried Pyrilampes, a man from one of the wealthiest families in the city. Plato’s relatives, Charmides and Critias, were politicians who were part of the Thirty Tyrants. At 18, he met Socrates and became his most loyal and enthusiastic disciple. He traveled to Egypt and from there to Italy, where he contacted Archytas. In philosophy, he was a student of Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus. In 388 BCE, he traveled to Sicily, where he met Dion and was allowed to try to organize his ideas in the city. Upon his return to Athens, he founded the Academy, on whose door he placed a sign that said, “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” He returned to Athens the following year and stayed there until his death, dedicated to writing. His works, written in dialogue form, offer a window into the era and its problems. They are not systematic treatises but conversations where the anecdote is key. The most common way to divide his works is into four periods:
- Socratic Dialogues: These include the works Plato wrote before his trip to Syracuse.
- Transition: These are the writings published between 388 and 385 BCE.
- Maturity: In his works from 385 BCE onward, Plato developed his most famous theories.
- Old Age: The writings from 370 BCE until his death contain strong criticisms of some of his previous theories.
Philosophical Knowledge: Plato’s Philosophy
All of Plato’s works are written in dialogue form. The reasons for this are several: dialogue was an established custom in Athens, and Socrates had developed his philosophy through dialogue without ever writing anything down. For Plato, philosophy is, first and foremost, a break from and criticism of the opposition to current, accepted mental habits. Philosophical reflection, for Plato, is not only condemnation but also construction.
Reality: The World of Scientific Knowledge and Ideas
If human beings can possess necessary, universal, and unchanging knowledge, then there must be real objects that are necessary, universal, and unchanging. Otherwise, scientific knowledge would have no value.
The World of Ideas and the Sensible World
Ideas have the following characteristics:
- They are objective: they are not thoughts but entities.
- They are universal.
- They are immutable and indivisible.
- They are eternal.
- They are ranked.
Knowledge: Knowledge as Recollection
Plato says that authentic knowledge, which is aimed at scientific ideas, is memory. Learning is synonymous with remembering, and teaching is “helping us remember what is forgotten.” Sensitive knowledge, obtained through the organs of this world, can only provide opinion. Intellectual knowledge is what provides science, since its objects, ideas, are universal, necessary, and immutable. Plato distinguishes varying degrees of both sensitive and intellectual knowledge, represented in the following way: A_D_C_E_B.
- The segment AC represents knowledge in the sense that it is characteristic of human beings who lack education. It provides opinions and has two levels:
- a) Represented by the segment AD, imagination is the knowledge that man obtains through conjectures.
- b) Represented by the segment DC, belief is knowledge of the sensible world.
- Segment CB represents intellectual knowledge. It is proper to educated people, allows for science, and has two levels:
- a) Segment EC, thought, gets out of the findings.
- b) Segment EB, knowledge, is obtained when, starting from hypotheses and based solely on ideas, one arrives at the highest principle.
Dialectic
Plato called dialectic the path, the method that ranges from imagination to knowledge, from the vision of shadows inside the cavern to the contemplation of sunlight. Dialectic is, therefore, a double direction:
- Ascending: the inquiry begins with the principle on which all hypotheses depend.
- Descending: it is the strategic implications of this principle in order to live justly.
The Human Being as Soul
For Plato, the human being is an eternal spiritual soul imprisoned in its body. The genuine, authentic self is the soul. Plato distinguishes three types of souls in humans: the rational (spiritual in nature), the irascible, and the concupiscent. The latter two belong to the body and disappear when it dies. Plato stands by the Pythagorean theory of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls from one body to another).
The Immortality of the Soul
The soul is the most important part of the human being. The human soul is immortal; it will exist when the human being has died because it has lived in the world of ideas before joining the body.
Action: Wisdom and Virtue
Reason is the human element. Therefore, the perfection of the human being is for the rational element to prevail over passion and instinct. The ideal human life, for Plato, is when the authentic soul, the rational soul, is dedicated to exercising the activity that is proper to it: the rational. As in Socrates, there is a total identification between wisdom and virtue. Virtue is necessary for wisdom, but it is not identified with it. The virtue of wisdom is necessary for the rational soul to dominate the irascible and concupiscent souls.