Plato

As promised, here's Plato.

·         The most important features of Plato’s are his utopia, his theory of ideas, arguments in favour of immortality, his cosmogony and finally his conception of knowledge as reminiscence rather than perception.

·         Due to many reasons he disliked democracy, the fall of Athens and the death of his teacher and mentor Socrates being two of them.

·         This anti-democratic feeling leads us to find other belief structures in Plato’s thought. He believed that education was the key to knowledge and enlightenment, especially knowledge of mathematics, which leads us to think he had some oligarchic leanings. He also believed that “enlightenment” was achieved through leisure, therefore the man who has to work for his existence will not be able to reach the level of knowledge or enlightenment where he will be able to usefully contribute ideas to society.

·         Therefore in order to be a philosopher, and contribute, you have to be either rich enough to fund yourself and your existence or be released from work obligations and sustained by the state. This shows a leaning towards aristocratic thoughts.

·         Plato’s most important dialogue is The Republic, in it he describes his Utopia.

·         He starts by deciding that the people should be divided into three classes, the common people, the soldiers and the guardians, and of the three only the guardians are to have political power. The guardians are to be chosen by the legislator and the title will be passed from father to son. This links into the ‘one royal lie’ that Plato decided was to be part of his Utopia. This was that there was to be a dogma that God has created men of three kinds, those made of gold, silver and brass. Those made of gold were fit to be guardians, of silver were fit to be soldiers and the brass were the working class manual labourers.

·         The main problem that Plato discerned was insuring that the guardians carried out the intentions of the legislator that picked them.

·         Though concerned with all the classes Plato concentrates on the guardians, most likely because he is entrusting them with society.

·         He believed education to be key and separated it into music and gymnastics. Here music was used to describe anything which needed musing over, so basically everything. Gymnastics, as today, was everything concerned with fitness and strength. When it comes to economics Plato is surprisingly communist, believing that the guardians should have small houses, no unnecessary private property and simple food eaten together in companies.

·         He was concerned with making sure that the young believed that nothing bad came from the gods, he made sure of this by preventing the teaching of the stories by Homer and Hesiod to children.

·         He believed that women were to have complete equality with men, even with the education of girls and boys. The guardians would be made up of both men and women.

·         Plato’s definition of justice is far different from our modern definition, which is mainly concerned with equality and property rights. For Plato justice consisted of paying debts.

·         This definition makes it possible to have inequalities of power and privilege without justice.

·         Plato’s theory of immortality is highly based upon his opinion and what he saw of Socrates before he died. Socrates drank the hemlock but remained cool, collected and unafraid of death. This is, if we are to believe Plato, because he genuinely was unafraid. There is the great example of Socrates sending his weeping wife away so that he could continue to discuss things with his students and associates.

·         One of the main irritants to Plato, in his theory of immortality, is the slavery to your body. This takes the form of the need to eat, drink, sleep and so on.

·         COSMOLOGY

·         Plato’s god did not create the world out of nothing, but created it out of pre-existing matter, he apparently “put intelligence in the soul and the soul in the body”

·         He believed that the 4 elements were in constant balance, though they were not the basis of what everything was made out of, so much as a state that the pre-existing matter was in. for example, fire was not a main element so much as a reaction of the main element constituting fire.

·         He believed that there were four kinds of animals; gods, birds, fish and land animals. The creator told the gods that he could destroy them but then left them to their own future. There were also apparently two different souls in a body, the mortal soul and the immortal soul. The mortal soul was subject to terrible and irresistible affections or urges, such as pleasure, pain, rashness, fear and so on. The mortal soul was located in the breast and the immortal in the head.