Plato

By Nadia El-Masri

Western philosophy, said Alfred North Whitehead, is a series of footnotes to Plato. The remark is only slightly exaggerated: for twenty-four centuries, nearly every great question in the field has been a response to something Plato wrote.

Plato was born in Athens around 428 BCE into an aristocratic family with political connections on both sides. As a young man he watched his city execute Socrates — the teacher he loved — and the shock bent his whole life. After years of travel through Megara, Egypt, and southern Italy, where he encountered Pythagorean mathematics and its mystical reverence for number, he returned to Athens around 387 and founded the Academy in a grove sacred to the hero Academus. It was the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, and it would last nearly nine hundred years, until the emperor Justinian closed it in 529 CE.

Plato wrote some thirty-five dialogues, and in them he invented philosophy as a literary and systematic enterprise. Socrates is the hero of most, but the doctrines are Plato's. At their center stands the Theory of Forms: the things we see and touch are imperfect copies of eternal, perfect realities — the Form of Justice, of Beauty, of the Good — grasped by reason, not the senses. From this flow his psychology (the soul has reason, spirit, and appetite, like a charioteer with two horses), his ethics (the just soul is the harmonious soul), and his politics. The Republic, his masterpiece, asks what justice is and answers by designing an ideal city: a ruthless, brilliant thought-experiment in which philosopher-kings rule, the family and private property are abolished for the guardians, and the famous allegory of the cave shows humanity chained before shadows, mistaking them for reality. The Symposium gives us the ladder of love ascending from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself; the Phaedo gives us Socrates' death and the soul's immortality.

Plato's student Aristotle would rebel against the Forms and found his own school down the road. The quarrel between the two — Plato the rationalist of the eternal, Aristotle the empiricist of the particular — became the engine of Western thought, running through Augustine and Aquinas, Descartes and Kant, to the present. Every philosophy department on earth still teaches the dialogues. The Academy's grove is gone; the questions are not. His late dialogues grow darker and more technical — the Sophist, the Statesman, the Laws, his longest work, which designs a second-best city for a world without philosopher-kings — but the central vision never wavers: reality has a structure, reason can grasp it, and the good life is the examined one.

Impact on civilization

Plato founded Western philosophy as an institution and as a method: the Academy was the first university, and the dialogue the first philosophical form. His Theory of Forms set the agenda for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics for two millennia, shaping Christian theology through Augustine, Islamic philosophy, and the entire rationalist tradition. The Republic invented political philosophy — the systematic imagination of the just society — and its images, from the philosopher-king to the cave, became permanent furniture of the Western mind. Through his student Aristotle and the Academy's nine-century run, Plato's influence structured education itself: the trivium and quadrivium, the medieval university, and the modern humanities all descend from the school in the grove. His fingerprints are on everything from the Christian doctrine of the soul to the modern research university's division into disciplines. When scientists speak of laws of nature or mathematicians of elegant proofs, they speak, unknowingly, the language Plato forged: the conviction that behind appearances lies an intelligible order.