Plato’s Philosophy: Influences, Impact, and Legacy
History of Plato’s Time
Athens was a thriving city after its victory in the Greco-Persian Wars (479 BC). The Peloponnesian War broke out, and Athens, which was a democracy, was defeated by Sparta, fighting for an aristocracy. Sparta imposed the dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants until the Athenians restored the democratic regime. All these political changes were the driving force of Plato’s philosophical development. Finally, democracy waned, prompting Alexander the Great to unify all the poleis into an empire.
Socio-Cultural Context of Ancient Greece
In Greece, there were three social groups: free and slaves, nobles and commoners, and citizens and foreigners. This changed with the advent of the merchants, who neither wanted to direct nor be directed. With the emergence of this new class, alliances were created between the aristocracy and others. Because of all the business travel, philosophical thoughts changed. These factors prompted a cultural boom, which included:
- The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
- The comedies of Aristophanes
- The histories of Herodotus and Thucydides
- The sculptures of Phidias and Praxiteles
- The philosophers Socrates and Plato
Philosophy in the Time of Plato
With democracy, which allowed the participation of citizens in the assemblies, the mastery of language arts became a priority. Therefore, the Sophists began to be appreciated, and the nature of the Presocratics lost interest. The Sophists were teachers paid to teach skills in persuasiveness to others. These were foreigners who defended relativism (the intellectual position whereby there is no single truth, but there are multiple truths that serve each person, each social group, or each culture). Socrates and Plato fully refused these teachings because they regarded these as destructive practices for the polis and believed that there must be a single truth.
Philosophical Influences on Plato
Several Presocratics influenced Plato:
- Heraclitus: Influenced some ideas from the sensible world, which Plato considered negligible. For Plato, the sensible world, like Heraclitus’s, is a changing reality.
- Parmenides: Plato adopted the different characteristics of being, which he applied to his ideas. He also adopted the division of the forms of knowledge. For Parmenides, there were two ways of knowing: the path of truth, which Plato called science, and the path of opinion, which Plato associated with the sensible world.
- Pythagoras: Influenced Plato’s dualism of body and soul, the immortality of the soul, reincarnation or transmigration of the soul, and the great importance attached to mathematics. The Arché, or principle of Pythagoras, is the number or measurability.
- Anaxagoras and the Atomists: They argued that there is an ordering intelligence (Nous) that manufactures the universe, which Plato used to talk of the Demiurge. The Atomists defended chance. For them, the chance of atoms is the opposite of Plato’s “necessity.”
- Socrates and the Sophists: Plato’s social interest aligns with his political objectives. He was against the relativism and skepticism of the Sophists. Socrates was his greatest inspiration; apart from his ideas, Plato copied his technique of dialogue to find universal answers.
Implications and Legacy of Plato’s Philosophy
Plato founded a school which he called the Academy, influencing all of its students. The most important was Aristotle, who initially accepted all of Plato’s ideas but later criticized the fact that ideas were in a different world from things. Plato’s impact on Neoplatonism focuses on emanation, whereby there is a perfect good from which realities recede, worsening. In the Middle Ages, Plato was imitated by Christian philosophers, especially St. Augustine, with a doubling of the worlds. His work “The Republic” also influenced many later writers who followed his model of an ideal city, like “Utopia” by Thomas More.
Plato has been criticized by many philosophers. For example, Machiavelli said his theory was unrealistic, and Popper claimed that his political approach was totalitarian. Kant was influenced by Plato, among other things, in the defense of immaterial realities and ethics, which gives priority to reason against inclinations. Nietzsche criticized Plato’s entire dualism, arguing that there is only the physical world. He also criticized Plato’s ethics because he said it was based on the values of death.
At present, Platonic philosophy is defended by currents of thought and universalist dialectics against relativism.