The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (7 page)

Plato claimed to trace his ancestry back to the old kings of Athens, to friends of the legendary Solon, and finally to the god Poseidon. His stepfather, in whose house he was raised, was a prominent supporter of Pericles. But Plato himself had seen more than enough of Athenian politics to make him critical of “democratic” ways. When only eighteen he seems to have been a listener, if not actually a disciple, of Socrates.

After Socrates was put to death, his friends, under suspicion by the regime, may have moved for a while to nearby Megara. At this time Plato may have taken something like a grand tour of southern Italy, Cyrene, neighboring Africa and Egypt. Some of his remarks in
The Laws
on Egyptian customs, games, art, and music have the authentic ring of the observer. Before he first visited Sicily, he had already arrived at his familiar axiom that “there will be no cessation of evils for the sons of men, till either those who are pursuing a right and true philosophy receive sovereign power in the States, or those in power in the States by some dispensation of providence become true philosophers.”

What Plato, now in his forties, found in southern Italy and Sicily excited his “strong disapproval of the kind of life which was there called the life of happiness, stuffed full as it was with the banquets of the Italian Greeks and Syracusans, who ate to repletion twice every day, and were never without a partner for the night. . . . For with these habits formed early in life, no man under heaven could possibly attain to wisdom—human nature is not capable of such an extraordinary combination.”

The fateful event of this first visit to Syracuse was meeting an attractive and impressionable young man, whose fortunes and misfortunes would draw Plato into Sicilian politics for the rest of his life. Dion became his eager disciple. At first Plato did not realize that Dion, son-in-law of the reigning “tyrant,” Dionysius I, was contriving the overthrow of the ruling tyranny. Could this be a time and a place for testing Plato’s vision of the philosopher-king? “For Dion, who rapidly assimilated my teaching as he did all forms of knowledge, listened to me with an eagerness which I had never seen equalled in any young man, and resolved to live for the future in a better way than the majority of Italian and Sicilian Greeks.” Dion’s reformed ways made him unpopular among his contemporaries. Numerous stories recount the efforts of Dionysius I to be rid of Plato. One tells that Dionysius I had Plato kidnapped and handed over to a Spartan admiral, who exposed him for sale as a slave at Aegina, but Plato was luckily ransomed by an acquaintance from Cyrene.

It was probably on his return to Athens (about 388 B.C.) that Plato founded his famous Academy. Some would call Plato’s Academy the ancestor of the modern university, and so have distinguished Plato as “the first president of a permanent institution for the prosecution of science by original research.” But it could not have been more Athenian. The site he chose—about a mile out of Athens—was a garden next to a grove sacred to the Hero Hekademus or Akademus, from whom it took the name “Academy.” It was reputed to be a delightful, quiet place with shaded walks and a gymnasium. Plato had a small house of his own nearby. He soon acquired fame as a lecturer and attracted pupils from other Greek cities. There was no admission or tuition fee, but he did receive handsome presents from the pupils and their rich families. The comedies of the time ridicule the students for their fine and delicate garments and their elegant affectations. This was a far cry from the atmosphere surrounding Socrates’ conversations, open to the public as he passed his days in the marketplace or in the public porticoes. The rural atmosphere of the Academy attracted and held students for three or four years. Athens’ fame as the school of Hellas was gained and sustained here in Plato’s Academy.

Isocrates’ competing institution was a school for practical success in the Athens of the day; Plato believed in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. And while Isocrates taught rhetoric and the arts of persuasion, Plato focused on mathematics.

Exactly how, when, or why Plato
wrote
the dialogues that became the foundation of Western philosophy remains a mystery. Perhaps his most famous Socratic dialogues were written before he was forty, and so before he founded his Academy. A few works, including his
Laws,
are usually ascribed to his old age. What might have been the course of Western philosophy if Socrates had never had a disciple in Plato?

Plato at the Academy—from the age of sixty till his death at eighty—busied himself organizing the school and lecturing. What Plato wanted was not written “works” of philosophy but active “discovery” in the company of other discovering minds. Aristotle describes Plato’s teachings at the Academy as “unwritten doctrine,” and he observes that Plato himself did not “lecture” from a manuscript. Plato’s famous lecture on “the Good,” supposed to be the best summary of his own philosophy, survives in diverse versions by hearers—Aristotle, Xenocrates, and Heraclides of Ponticus, who published their notes. But no manuscript by Plato himself has survived.

What might Plato have done with the last twenty years of his life, if he had not been seduced into a Sicilian adventure? The death of Dionysius I of Syracuse in 367 gave Plato his tempting opportunity. As annually elected dictator and generalissimo, Dionysius I had ruled Syracuse for thirty-eight years. Plato’s first visit to Sicily had introduced him to the Pythagorean communities that flourished there, pursuing a tradition quite different from that of the pioneer Ionian scientists. A charismatic personality, Pythagoras (born about 580 B.C.) of Samos had settled in southern Italy about 525 B.C. There he founded a school that had the appeal of a religion. Among other mystic dogmas he taught the transmigration of souls, and even claimed to remember his own earlier incarnations. Pythagoras saw the world organized around the aesthetic of numbers—for him the only reality. Having discovered the mathematical basis of musical intervals, Pythagoras had elaborated a cosmology of mathematical order. None of Pythagoras’ writings survived and, unlike Socrates, he never had the good luck to attract a recording disciple. But some of his themes lived on in Plato’s dialogues. And the overseas communities in Magna Graecia in southern Italy and Sicily tempted Plato with the opportunity he never had in Athens.

When Dionysius I died in 367 B.C. he was succeeded by his son, Dionysius II. This young man of weak character and little education was not up to the challenge of the expanding Carthaginians. Plato’s favorite pupil, the young man’s uncle Dion, now became ruling regent. “He thought it essential,” Plato records, “that I should come to Syracuse by all manner of means and with the utmost possible speed to be his partner in these plans, remembering in his own case how readily intercourse with me had produced in him a longing for the noblest and best life.” But Dion’s party of young men fed Plato’s misgivings, “for young men are quick in forming desires which often take directions conflicting with one another.” “Lest I might some day appear to myself wholly and solely a mere man of words,” Plato decided to dare the Syracusan morass. “If ever anyone was to try to carry out in practice my ideas about laws and constitutions, now was the time.” With the enthusiastic aid of Dion, he needed only to persuade the new dictator of Syracuse.

Dionysius II proved even weaker than Plato had feared. After Plato had been in Syracuse only four months, intriguers at the court persuaded the insecure young tyrant that Dion was plotting to seize the throne. Dion was put out to sea in a small boat. Dionysius II feared being discredited by the departure of Plato and imprisoned him in the Syracusan acropolis. The young tyrant, though he became attached to Plato, refused to learn the lessons that might have made him a successful philosopher-king. Still Plato’s influence at court appeared when the study of geometry became fashionable. Defeated by court intrigues and Dionysius II’s weakness, Plato finally gave up his effort to educate the young ruler and was allowed to return to Athens.

This was not yet the end of the Sicilian adventure. Dionysius II kept in touch with Plato. Even after the young tyrant seized Dion’s property and forced his wife to make a dynastic marriage, Plato did not give up hope. Surprisingly, he responded to still another invitation, and returned again to advise Dionysius in 361 B.C. This trip was not entirely fruitless, for Plato did actually make a draft of a constitution for a federation of overseas Greek cities. A year later, when his life was threatened by Dion’s enemies, Plato returned to Athens, and never again played a role in Syracusan politics. Dion himself kept trying. He returned to Syracuse hoping to take over the government, but was murdered by one of his own officers. Perhaps the finest fruit of all these Sicilian adventures was Plato’s vivid autobiographical letter.

Could someone of Plato’s intelligence and his chastening experience of political intrigue in Athens and Syracuse ever really have hoped to test his utopian vision in the profligate city-state of Syracuse? May he not at least have welcomed the opportunity, not available in Athens, to see what good could be done by one properly instructed dictator? Or perhaps he thought that his improved constitutions could help the Greek communities in Sicily resist the invading Carthaginians.

* * *

The Way of Dialogue, with its idealization of the spoken word—the sparks that fly in living conversation—makes it difficult to define the doctrines of particular philosophers. It is risky to turn Socrates’ questions into answers. Of all literary forms, then, dialogues are least suited to summary. Still, one idea more than others that have emerged from Plato’s works has become a symbol of “Platonism” and a clue to Plato’s own way of seeking. This was his Theory of Ideas (or Forms). We cannot know how much of it was owed to Socrates, but the historic influence of the theory is plainly due to Plato and his disciples.

One impulse to the theory must have been the malaise in Athens in the lifetimes of Socrates and Plato. Thucydides in his
History of the Peloponnesian Wars
gave a classic description of that malaise:

. . . the whole Hellenic world was convulsed. . . . The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same. . . . Revolution thus ran its course from city to city. . . . Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice, moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. . . . Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. . . . Thus every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.

To confront this impermanence, the Sophist teachers had prepared their own paradoxical response: “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras’ maxim was a way of seeking solace from the evanescence of everything else in the permanence of Man himself. At the same time they expressed the relativity of all other standards. So they taught rhetoric and the arts of persuasion, how to get on in the world where you happened to find yourself. Socrates, on the other hand, had sought to unmask the false contemporary certitudes, and to provide a technique of universal definition.

Plato, moving along Socrates’ path, came up with a dazzling idea, to which he gave unforgettable form in his myth of the cave in
The Republic:

Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. (Jowett trans.)

The cave becomes Plato’s stage for revealing the difference between his “real” world and the world of shadows which others have mistaken for reality. If anyone is “liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck around and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen only the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision. . . . will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”

So Plato urges us, too, to seek the changeless forms only crudely sensed in our shadowy sense experience. To describe objects in this changeless world, our English word “idea” is misleading. The Greek word
ideai
connotes “form.” But, while we think of “ideas” as somehow fleeting and unreal, for Plato the Idea was fully and permanently real. At the head of the hierarchy of ideas stands the Good, which plays the same role in the intelligible world that the sun plays in the visible. And it is not only grand ideas like the Good that have a static eternal reality. Even a humble object like a bed is a shadow of some static eternal Form.

Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say—for no one else can be the maker?
No.
There is another which is the work of the carpenter?
Yes.
And the work of the painter is a third?
Yes.
Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?
Yes, there are three of them.
God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.
Why is that?
Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the ideal bed and not the two others.
Very true, he said.
God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only.