Plato

The teaching

Taught from Plato's dialogues, above all the Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedrus, the Phaedo and the Timaeus.

The forms

Plato teaches that the things we see are not the most real things. Many things are beautiful, many are equal, many are just, and each is beautiful in one way and not in another, at one time and not at another, to one viewer and not to another. But there is beauty itself, the equal itself, justice itself: each one form, always the same, grasped by thought and not by the senses. Beautiful things are beautiful by sharing in beauty itself, and knowledge in the full sense is of the forms, while of changing things there is only opinion.

The soul knew the forms before birth, and learning here is remembering them. Sticks or stones that look equal to one person and unequal to another remind us of an equality that never looks unequal, and we could not judge them to fall short of it unless we had known it before we ever used our eyes. Other parts of his teaching stand on their own pages: rebirth on the page of whose teaching it is, Atlantis among the lost worlds, the judgement of the dead and the myth of Er on the page of the Greek underworld, the elements built from triangles on the page of the Platonic solids, and the daimon on the page of daimons and intelligences.

The sun, the line and the cave

Above all the forms stands the form of the Good. As the sun gives visible things both the light to be seen by and their growth, so the Good gives the things that are known their being known and their very being, though it is itself beyond being. The ascent towards it runs up a divided line: from shadows and images to visible things, then to the objects of mathematics, reasoned out from assumptions, and at the top to the forms, reached by dialectic, which climbs past every assumption to the first principle of all.

Then comes the cave. Prisoners chained from childhood face its back wall, with a fire behind them and a low wall between, along which others carry figures of men and animals; they see only the shadows and take them for everything there is. One is freed and turned round, dazzled, and dragged up the steep way into the sun; he sees first shadows, then reflections, then the things themselves, then the stars by night, and at last the sun, and understands that it governs all he has seen. If he went back down, his eyes would be dim in the dark, the others would laugh at him, and if they could lay hands on the one who tried to free them, they would kill him.

Education, then, is not putting sight into blind eyes. The power to learn is already in every soul, and education is the art of turning the whole soul, as an eye can turn only with the whole body, from what comes to be towards what is, until it can bear to look at the brightest. And those who have made the ascent must go down again, to share the labours of those below and to govern for their sake.

The three parts of the soul

The soul has three parts. Reason calculates and loves learning; spirit is angered and loves honour; appetite desires food, drink and the pleasures of the body. Their conflicts show that they are three: a thirsty man can hold back from drinking, and Leontius, longing to look at the bodies of executed men and disgusted with himself, at last ran up and cursed his own eyes.

Justice in the soul is each part doing its own work: reason ruling, because it is wise and takes thought for the whole, spirit as its ally, appetite obeying, all three tuned like the notes of a scale. Wisdom is the virtue of reason, courage that of spirit holding to what reason commands, and self-control the agreement of all three about who should rule. Injustice is civil war in the soul, its sickness, and no wealth or power makes it worth having. The Republic's city in words has the same three parts and reaches the same end: until philosophers rule as kings, or kings truly love wisdom, there is no rest from troubles for cities or for the human race.

The madness of love and the growing wings

In the Phaedrus some madness is a gift of the gods: the prophet's, the healing madness of the rites, the poet's from the Muses, and best of all the lover's. The soul is like a charioteer with two winged horses, one noble and one unruly. Once it followed the gods round the heavens and glimpsed, beyond them, true being, colourless, shapeless and untouchable, seen only by the mind. Losing its wings, it fell into a body, and of all it saw there, only beauty shines clearly through the senses here.

So when a lover sees a beautiful face, he remembers beauty itself. He shivers and is struck with awe; then a strange heat comes over him, and the stumps of the wings begin to swell and sprout. The charioteer and the noble horse must hold back the unruly one again and again until it is humbled; then lovers who keep to a life of order and philosophy grow their wings together, and at the end of this life they are light and winged, having won the first of the three contests of the soul's return.

The ladder of love

In the Symposium Socrates repeats what Diotima taught him. Love is not itself beautiful but the desire for the beautiful, and more truly the desire to possess the good for ever. Because mortals cannot live for ever, love seeks immortality by giving birth in beauty: some in body, by children, others in soul, by wisdom and virtue, poems and laws, children more lasting than any of flesh.

Then she gives the right way to go. The lover begins with one beautiful body and the fine words it inspires; then sees that the beauty of all bodies is one and holds the single body lightly; then values beauty of soul above that of bodies, and from it comes to the beauty of practices and laws, then to the beauty of the kinds of knowledge, until, turned towards the wide sea of beauty, he brings forth many fine thoughts in a boundless love of wisdom. At the end he suddenly sees beauty itself: not coming to be or passing away, not beautiful in one part and ugly in another, but itself by itself, of one form for ever. Only there does a person bring forth not images of virtue but true virtue, and become dear to the gods and, if any human can, immortal.

Philosophy as practice for dying

Those who rightly practise philosophy practise nothing but dying and being dead. Death is the release of the soul from the body, and the philosopher's life is a loosening of that bond: gathering the soul into itself, away from the body's pleasures and fears, so that it can see things as they are by thought alone. The soul is fastened to the body as if in a prison, looking at things through its bars, and philosophy finds it so and gently sets it free.

True virtue is a purification. To trade pleasures for pleasures and fears for fears, as most do when they are brave for fear of something worse, is a slave's virtue; the one true coin for which all must be exchanged is wisdom. So the old saying of the rites holds: many carry the wand, but few are inspired.

The world as a living being

The Timaeus tells how the world was made. Its maker was good, and being good he grudged nothing, and wished all things to be as like himself as they could be. He brought the restless visible into order and made the world a living being with soul and reason, one and whole, round and turning in its place, since what has reason is better than what has none. He blended its soul from the same, the different and being, divided it by the ratios of music, and bent it into two circles: the circle of the same, which carries the fixed stars, and the circle of the different, split into the seven paths of the planets.

Time is the moving image of eternity: eternity rests in unity, and the maker made an image of it that moves according to number, setting the sun, moon and planets to mark and guard the numbers of time. Beneath all this lies the receptacle, the nurse of becoming, which receives every form and keeps none. And sight was given for one great purpose: that seeing the untroubled turnings of reason in the heavens, we might set right by them the troubled turnings of our own minds.

What cannot be written

The highest things are not learned from books. In the Phaedrus a written word cannot answer a question or defend itself, and the true writing is the one a teacher writes with knowledge in the soul of a learner, by living talk, a word that can defend itself and bears seed in other souls.